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The new member of the family...

So here it is.  I bought a MacBook.  After literally 10+ years of being a “Dell Guy”, well Dell finally ran out of laptops that I found interesting, and my one experience with HP laptops has convinced me to never buy another one.

My last notebook, the Adamo13 was one of my favorites.  Ultra slim, solid state just about everything.  Could do a 5 hour plane-ride almost without issue.

But I needed something else.  After flipping back and forth between Linux and Windows I realized I needed something that could go both ways.  The more I thought about it, Apple seemed like the way to go.  Apple runs on a BSD Linux kernel after all, has a linux command-line (if you know where to get to it) and pretty good compatibility.

So when I finally got it in my head to upgrade, well I went ahead and dropped the hammer on a 15″ macbook pro.  (so to speak, no actual hammers were involved.)

So far I’m pretty happy with my choice.  But when the first person at work saw me on it and asked me the idiot question I got pissy.

“Are you a Mac now?”

Under breath: “No idiot, I’m a person.  I’m *USING* a Mac.”

Let me break it down.  I have in my arsenal the following systems.

In my household and business I have:

3 Desktop PC’s running windows 7
3 Laptops running Windows 7
1 Dell 1850 running Windows 2003 Server . (That despite all my kajoling, refuses to survive a P2V)

4 VMWare ESXi hosts containing the following:

11 Windows 2008 Servers
2 Windows 2003 Servers
10 CentOS 5 Servers
5 CentOS 6 Servers
2 SUSE Enterprise 11 Linux

and now

1 15″ MacBook Pro

This is the thing.  I’m a technology pragmatist.  I use what works best and does what I need it to.  In the limited scope of a transportable computer, a Mac seems to do what I need nicely, and yes, it comes in an attractive and (so far) fairly durable package.

But I’m not a Mac.  Nor am I a PC.  I’m a *PERSON* who uses a computer.  (Several actually)

Religion has no place in technology.  Leave it in the church.

Oh, and I’m still not buying a #$!@!? iPhone.

Well, my 30 days are up.

I enjoyed using it, and I definitely see the upside in Apple computers over PC’s.  But I’m going back to my Dell Precision690. (Already have actually)

Most of the “failings” of the Mac G5 Pro I was using can probably be attributed to the fact that it’s a G5.  So much software doesn’t work on the PowerPC’s, developers have given up on them.. (as is probably justified, they’re old)  and upgrading to a MacIntel would probably solve a few (but not all) of the problems I was having with compatibility.

A few points:

Negative:

• MS Entourage had significant issues.  I was forced to use the EWS (Exchange Web Services) client instead of the standard, because my exchange environment is Exchange 2010.  Maybe I jumped the gun in upgrading to Exchange2010.  Entourage 2008 doesn’t work with Excahnge2010, because Microsoft did away with WebDAV.
• The MS RDP Client for Mac (v1.0 due to PPC Support) only supports a single session.  I usually have 3-4 RDP sessions open at a time, so this was a significant limitation.
• TimeMachine doesn’t like to back up to a network drive.  I found a few workarounds but was never able to try and get it working.  I prefer to backup to an offsite location.
• NTFS read-write support doesn’t exist in Leopard (10.5.8)  Though read-only support exists, if I can’t write to an NTFS formatted thumbdrive this is useless to me.  I’ve found some third-party drivers but they are both expensive and buggy.  I’m told this exists in SnowLeopard (10.6.x) but again, not willing to shell out that kind of money for a computer to do something I can do with windows.
• Software is expensive…  The Version of Quickbooks that I paid $99 for on windows was $299 on Mac.  WTF is up with that?!

Positive:

• I love having a native BASH shell.  I do a *LOT* of scripting, and it’s nice to be able to do it hands on.
• The GUI is very intuitive, I like the Dock (Akin to Cairo-Dock for Linux)
• I enjoyed iPhoto – the face-recognition, while imperfect, was interesting to play with.
• Application installations were easy, and almost NEVER required a reboot.
• It’s mostly quiet.  I love a computer I don’t hear running.  Though the Precision is pretty quiet too.  And the Mac “Jet-Engines” when you put it under load whereas the Dell doesn’t.

- And finally:

• The start-up chime the mac makes *REALLY* annoys my eldest son, who for some reason (couldn’t be his dad, could it?) HATES apple products.  I must have rebooted it ten times one night while he was in the other room playing BlackOps just to hear him complain.

Bottom line, I work with EMC products.  Much of the software I use in my work runs on Windows by virtue of the fact that EMC writes it that way.  (Why Symmwin hasn’t been ported to CentOS or some such yet is beyond me….would save the company MILLIONS every year in software licensing)

But it all comes down to cost.  The starting price of a new Mac Pro is $2499 (Source: Apple)  That’s for a ‘simple’ box with a quad-core processor.  The higher-end systems (12-core, 2x 6-core CPU’s) run $4,999.

Macs is more expensive.  As a side-note.  I walked into Micro-Center to buy memory for it.  The G5 uses standard DDR, PC3200 memory.  In the *SAME STORE* memory was two different prices, depending on whether you were in the Mac side or the PC side.  For PC’s the 1GB PC3200 memory was $29/ea.

On the Mac side, it was $59/ea.  What amazed me mostly was the fact that the guy behind the counter said that people would GLADLY pay the extra $30 for the exact same memory because it said “Mac Ready” on the label.  (It was even the same manufacturer)

Wow.  That’s all I can say about that.  Wow.  That’s abusive.  That’s taking advantage of people who don’t know any better.  Double?  Really Apple?  (Well this wasn’t apple, but it is the general problem.)

Let’s put this into perspective.  The Dell Precision 690 I have runs 2x Dual-Core 3.0Ghz Xeon CPU’s, 8G of ram, and it cost me less than $1,000 when bought seperately.  It’s a faster box, (Twice as many CPU cores, DDR2, PC5300 memory, etc)

Now I’m not the type to buy the latest and greatest.  I’ve never bought a “new” laptop in my life, (I prefer refurbs, especially since Dell sells them with the exact same warranty as new at half the price.) I drive a 6-year old Prius, my wife drive’s a 10-year old Chevy.  I have a modest house in the suburbs that’s slightly crooked but fits my needs, but isn’t flashy by any stretch.  And every piece of computer equipment I buy for the datacenter is second-hand.  (we just acquired a pair of Cisco 9140 Switches, how many generations back is that?)

To go out and buy a “NEW” Mac for those prices is completely INSANE.  Now I could probably buy one used on ebay.  (Apple people tend to upgrade often, so there are lots of them out there.)

So in my humble view – Macs are great personal computers, and wonderful graphics arts systems.  They *CAN* be used in business if you’re willing to make some sacrifices, but again, if you want stuff to just work, Windows is still the way to go for business.

I *MAY* consider a used MacBook Pro though.  I can see where the portable version would come in VERY handy, and you can get Intel-based MacBooks on Ebay (lease-returns) pretty cheap.  (I’m amazed Apple doesn’t have an outlet store like Dell does)

This concludes my latest experiment.

P.S. For Sale – Mac Pro G5 Tower.  Dual 2.5Ghz PPC, 8GB Ram, 2x 250G HardDisks, dual-port Video, Keyboard/Mouse (new).  MacOS 10.5.6 Leopard (Installed, no media)

Make me an offer.

I told you I had no concept of days right?

Well I think it’s an “I can use this” thing.  The only downside I’ve found so far probably has more to do with my outdated hardware than anything else.

I’ve since upgraded the SIngle Processor 1.6Ghz G5 to a dual-processor 2.5Ghz G5.  The difference in performance is obviously grand, plus the dual 2.5 has 8 DIMM slots for memory instead of 4.

So now I’m up to 8G of Ram.

What I found most interesting is that to move from the old system to the new it was simply a matter of move the drives over.  I guess simplification and standardization of the hardware means that unlike windows/PC hosts, you never have to worry about whether or not the drivers are installed when you upgrade.

I also had a pretty good time with “TimeMachine”

It seems like it does a great “Grandfather-Father-Son” backup automatically, and without the user having to understand what a “GFS” backup is.  So you can restore to any hour in the last 24, day in the last month, or month in the last (however much disk-space you’ve got.)

What I liked is that nothing special was required to restore from disk.  Just the OSX boot CD.  Boot, select “restore from backup” and poof, or tah-dah, or whichever.  Windows7 has something fairly similar, but you have to build a recovery CD for it to work, probably because it has to store whatever raid-specific drivers you’re using.

All in all, a positive experience.  I may still go back to my Precision690 though…Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz processors and 8G of ram can run circles around the older G5 hardware.

I haven’t decided.

Ok, I might be sold.

Though the outdated hardware has posed a few limitations, I’m not so worried about that.  I did just order a Dual 2.5Ghz G5 off Ebay for $300 because the one thing I *AM* driven nuts by is the pounding that this single 1.6Ghz PPC chip is completely incapable of taking.  I’m hoping that the new one has more than the 4 DIMM slots this one has…more memory couldn’t hurt.

I’ve obtained a copy of Mac:Office 2008, Photoshop, and a few other neat pieces to play with, but so far I’ve not dove completely into it.  (My laptop is still on my desk as well, just in case I should need it)  Entourage 2008 Web Service edition was added because of course, I’m running Exchange2010, and WebDAV has been removed after Exchange2k7.

The other thing I’ve noticed is the backup/restore process worked wonderfully.  I wiped the drives and built a new 1.8TB RaidSet on the new drives, which finally gave me a partition of appropriate size, and booted from the CD, Selecting “Restore from TimeMachine backup”

Impressively enough it took less than 2.5 hours to restore the OS and everything I had done on it to that point.  When it rebooted, there were no strange messages, though on opening the “Mail” app, I found that it had to go and re-import all of the mail that had already been downloaded.

Oh well, not THAT huge a deal.

I’ve done something similar with Windows7 recently, but it required a “RecoveryCD” be made before you could run the restore.

The best part of this new setup, by far.  Is access to BASH. I *HATE* that there doesn’t seem to be a decent CygWin shell anywhere on the market for windows.  I do a *LOT* of shell scripting both for work and because I find it fun, and this makes life very easy.

So I’m trying a disk upgrade.  One of the spare 250G drives I threw into the Mac when I got it failed (Lower-bay, which I’m assuming was disk-2 of 2) so I decided I would try my hand at upgrading the disk.

I realized that the 250G drives i put in there won’t be enough to hold my pictures and music alone, let alone the rest of the stuff that I usually keep on my desktop.

So I found a 2TB drive to put in it’s place.

The Swap went swimmingly.  Shut down, pop the old drive out, pop the new drive in, took a little playing around (and a quick google search) to get the new disk added to the raid-set, and a few hours later, Tah-Dah. 

So then it comes to adding the other 2TB drive in and mirroring back.  Simple process right?

I shut down again, pulled the top drive out, put the new 2TB drive in it’s place, etc etc etc.

Nada.

It seems that while the data is contained on both disks, the host is only set to look at the first disk for it’s boot device.  Oversight?

So I used the google, something I’m priding myself on my ability to do these days.  (What do people with only one computer do when they get into trouble?)  And found that I have to boot from the CD and manually mirror the disk back using the disk-utilities on the CDRom.

Makes sense.  Though you’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to, on failing to retrieve boot information from disk0, to look on disk1 before giving up.

Does anyone of my five readers know if there is there a way to force a boot to the “up” drive in the set?

I would gravitate to the storage end of things wouldn’t I…

So here’s the underlying problem.

Note the 1.8TB RaidSet1.  Now Note the 232.8GB RaidSet1.

The problem seems to be that while both devices are owned by the raid set, and the “RAID Slice” itself on each drive is 1.8TB, the partition on the underlying slice is stubbornly stuck at 232.8G.

SO…

This makes the filesystem *WAY* smaller than it could be.

Since I don’t have anything appreciable on it…  I’m going to back it up using Time Machine, and reinstall.  (I’ve heard complaints about time machine, so I’m going to want to see work it before I actually come to depend on it.)

*THAT* will be tomorrow’s post.

My definition of “Day” changes…well…daily.

I’m having to do some shuffling of data off my old PC Workstation and I found something interesting.

MacOS can’t WRITE to an NTFS volume without a third-party driver.  It can read from it just fine.

I ran into a situation where I had to consolidate data from 2x 2TB drives onto one to free space for “The Next Step” (which you’ll read about tomorrow if you care) and so I connected them both to the Mac to hopefully do a quick ‘copy’ from one to the other.

Nope.  Not a chance.

MacOS can’t write to an NTFS volumes.  Now I found a few third-party drivers and tried one that had a 15 day trial version…  Only to find my way into what I can only assume is the Mac version of the “Blue Screen of Death”  (The “You must turn your computer off NOW” screen – how rude.)

What I find interesting about this is this.  Linux can read/write from an NTFS volume just fine.  Since MacOS is BSD Linux, I can only assume that Apple has made the conscious decision not to support NTFS writes.  Probably because it provides people with a simple migration path OFF Apple hardware, which, as any hardware vendor would like to believe, no-one would ever want to do.

Still – my experience is largely positive.  Got my work VPN up and running on it without too much angst and work.  And my son is sufficiently horrified at the sound of the power-on chord (there’s probably a fancy word for it) that I make up reasons to reboot when he’s in the room.

I can see that the entertainment value of this investment will be limitless.

Ok, Day 2.  The Mac is now under my desk where my PC used to be.

So far It’s been a mixed bag.  But part of that is kind of understandable.

I’m running an older G5, with the PPC970 chip in it.  (Only one of them 1.6Ghz, 800Mb FSB)

This means I’m already seeing some sluggishness.  Again, if I had a 1.6Ghz P4 I’d be seeing the same thing, so this is not actually a negative.

Look-and-feel wise I’m liking it.  Mostly because I’ve been running Ubuntu 10.10 with the Cairo-Dock for some time now on my Dell Adamo 13.  My gods it looks identicial.

So far, the cons -

1.  Not nearly enough USB ports, and my Best-Buy purchased Belkin 4+1 USB card causes the eternal hang at the blank blue screen.

2.  The case doesn’t have a place for a Media bay (IE Flash storage, camera cards, etc)  I have to use an external.  See point #1 about USB ports.

3.  Got a dual-port video card in it.  I was happy to see this.  One of the ports is something I’ve never seen before.  Guess I have to pay a visit to best-buy tomorrow.

4.  There are only two internal drive slots, and really nowhere else to mount an internal HD.  Whereas my Dell Precision690 had four, so I could put two fairly high-speed drives in for the boot partition and two slower 2TB drives in for data.  In the Mac, everything goes on the two, so unless I want to run everything over the network, I’m kinda stuck.

And while this isn’t strictly speaking a ‘con’ for the Macintosh, there is no copy of Office2k8 available on Technet…And Office/Mac 2k11 only works on the Intel platform, not PPC.

And the pros:

1.  It’s smooth.  The BSD Linux definitely has everything I’ve come to expect from a Linux distro, Once I found out where they hid the bash prompt, generated an SSH key and threw it into my authorized_keys directory on the CentOS servers I have running catbytes.com right now, I can get into and work on all of my systems.  (I haven’t found the RDP client yet, but I know it’s out there.)

2.  The smaller keyboard and in-line mouse that Apple is famous for leaves a lot more room on the desk for my usual clutter.

3.  It’s *QUIET*.   I can barely tell it’s running, while the P690′s do have some active cooling and so do make some noise, this thing is absolutely silent.

4.  Software compatibility seems OK.  And by that I mean other than Office 2k11, I haven’t found anything that won’t install even with the older hardware / OS.

I’ve never actually owned a mac..

I guess right up until now.

It was a gift.  I didn’t buy one.  Had no memory or hard-drives but hell, those are cheap right?

Had no operating system….  Not as cheap but still easily doable.  (*WAY* cheaper than Windows – Score 1 for Apple)

I’m installing to an older PowerMac G5.  Single CPU, 4G of ram.   Not fancy but I’m also not spending $1,500 on this little experiment.  I also bought an actual Apple keyboard and mouse, simply becuase I figure if I’m going to experience it, I’m going to experience it right.  They’re cute, but Apple must be pretty proud of them, because I’ve never paid $50 for a wired mouse in my life.  (The “Magic Mouse” was $69 and I briefly considered it before realizing that this “free” mac has already cost me about $500 in parts)

Oh – The reason it was a giveaway?  Bad power supply.  Ebay fetched me a *NEW* one for $125 and while it, at first, seemed bigger than the place it was supposed to fit, once it was in it was pretty slick.

I’ve been called inflexibile in the past.  Someone who doesn’t bend from what he thinks he knows.  I’ve argued against Macs as being “Toys” and “Not ready for Business” and saying that I’m “Not ready to contribute to the Steve Jobs Buy-Me-A-New-Organ” fund.

Ok the last part is still true.  I don’t care for Steve Jobs, I think he’s way too much ego for one (allegedly) human being.

I’ve been a Windows person for a long time, MCSE certified (lapsed & I haven’t put it on my resume in years because it’s not the work I want)  though I will *ALWAYS* prefer some kind of Linux/Unix under the covers.  There is just so much more you can do with a Linux desktop without dropping a dime.  (My Dell runs Ubuntu 10.10)

So fate presented me with a gift of a Macintosh, I decided that I would spend 30 days using it as my primary computer, wherever possible, and see how I like it.  I’ll document it here, this being the place to document things like this.  If I still hate it at the end of 30 days, at least I’ll be able to sound like I know what I’m talking about when I blast people for the ‘toys’ they use.

(Next think you know I’ll be saying I support using tape as primary storage…) 

(No, that won’t be happening)

So far so good.  The thing is whisper quiet, which is a HUGE plus for me.  (It’s hard to have conference calls with a jet-engine sitting on your desk.  The Precision 690 I replaced my last desktop with is better, but still not perfect. (and throws a *LOT* of heat.)

It’s taken about an hour and a half to install the OS.  I’m attributing that to the single CPU and older system.  I’m sure the newer ones run faster.  If Apple wants to send me a free one I’ll be sure to comment on how fast it is.

I’m replacing my desktop with this for one main reason.  My goal is to force myself to use it wherever possible.  I have my Dell running Linux and an HP running Win7 should it significantly impede my ability to work.

Gotta run, the install just finsihed.