North Star Labs

Here’s a quick script I cooked up to turn off the blinding light that is my iMac display when I go to bed at night.

Features:

• Runs great from Quicksilver.
• Talks to you. (May not be a feature.)
• Doesn’t require administrative rights.

  #!/bin/bash
  # Jeff McCune 
  export CURRENT_DELAY=$(pmset -g | grep displaysleep | awk '{print $2}')
  # Charger or Battery Flag.
  pmset -g | grep -q '^AC.*\*' && export MODE="-c" || export MODE="-b"
  say "The display will shut off in about 90 seconds" &
  # force allows this to work for non-admin users.
  pmset force $MODE displaysleep 1
  # Quicksilver blocks until script completion.  Fork off the reset command.
  bash -c 'sleep 120; pmset force $MODE displaysleep $CURRENT_DELAY' &
  exit 0

I’ve setup a public facing Git repository and gitweb interface to publish my patches to puppet and any other open source projects which may use Git in the future.

The locations are:

• Jeff’s Git Web
• http://northstarlabs.net/git/

If you’re a puppet developer, you’re able to track my repository easily with:

  git remote add mccune http://northstarlabs.net/git/puppet

James Reynolds mentioned on the Mac Enterprise mailing list that /etc/rc.local scripting is no longer a viable option to execute scripts at boot time, before the loginwindow presents itself to the user.

In Mac OS X 10.4, I’ve relied heavily on /etc/rc.local to execute a number of management scripts, and /etc/rc.local has always irritated me as a solution because of the parallel nature of sub-systems coming online during the Mac OS X boot process. Note; I didn’t say “boot sequence.” For example, I have some pretty extensive code to simply detect if DNS resolution is working or not.

Now that loginwindow is started from launchd, we’re able to replace it with our own scripts, and ultimately call it when we’re finished. I have yet to try this as a replacement for my current system, but I’m hopeful there aren’t as many issues figuring out what’s available and what isn’t at boot time, now that many more processes are started form launchd.

I’ll report back with any problems I’m sure to encounter migrating my startup scripts to launchd in Leopard.

As a system administrator with a very large music collection, I’ve always been mildly irritated at the difficulty accessing my “master” music library while away from home.

Enter Simply Media a free, small application which does just as the name promises.

My iTunes library back home just shows up in my shared iTunes listing, regardless of where I am. No firewall hackery, nothing to configure, it just works, and works well.

The iTunes integration is fantastic.

I’ve run into several problems backing up our central file servers with Bacula, mostly centered around the sheer number of files (~6 million) a single job must process and store into the MySQL catalog.

I ran into the following error last night, attempting to back up the entire 6TB array as a single job:

  07-Nov 18:10 backup-dir JobId 3: Fatal error: sql_create.c:732 sql_create.c:732 insert INSERT INTO batch VALUES (1580771,3,'/Volumes/0/export/users/kodama/Desktop/GAP/gap4r4/small/small2/','sml800.z','OAAAD DkeW IGk B ih C+ A KZn BAA BY BHLtzL 1sNQO BFnqZZ A A C','0') failed:
  Incorrect key file for table '/tmp/#sql2459_94_0.MYI'; try to repair it

After doing a bit of research, I’ve concluded the /tmp volume, which is only a 256M tmpfs partition is filling to capacity before the job is able to complete.

Restarting the job this morning confirms MySQL is spooling data into /tmp.

  [root@backup tmp]# ls -l /tmp/
  total 332
  -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 319276 Nov  8 09:48 #sql511e_3_0.MYD
  -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql   1024 Nov  8 09:48 #sql511e_3_0.MYI
  -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql   8722 Nov  8 09:48 #sql511e_3_0.frm

My solution for the time being is to reconfigure mysql to use /var/tmp for it’s temporary storage, rather than /tmp. This places the data on a much larger file system.

# /etc/my.cnf
[mysqld]
tmpdir=/var/tmp

I’m also planning to split the job into smaller jobs, using regular expressions to include only pieces of the home directory tree at a time. This will keep the number of files each job needs to handle under a reasonable threshold.

I’ve been doing a lot of subversion branch, test, merge cycles against our main Puppet configuration repository. I’ve run into issues when both the trunk and my testing branches are modified after I’ve forked off my branch.

This creates merge conflicts when I’m done testing, and need to merge my changes back into the production branch.

In an effort to reduce the overhead associated with manually resolving each conflict that arises from the divergence, I’ve started employing the use of svnmerge.py.

It’s great.

  svn copy cluster-orange-server cluster-orange-server-test01
  svn checkin cluster-orange-server-test01 -m 'Branched testing off.'
  cd cluster-orange-server-test01

  svnmerge.py init
  svn ci -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt

Now that my pristine branch of the production code has been initialized with svnmerge, I’m free to make changes to my testing copy. Once I need to merge back into production, I just need:

  svnmerge.py merge

The DVD drive on my desktop Mac is broken, making it difficult to install the operating system. I wanted to put Leopard on this machine today, so I tried installing to the machine from my MacBook Pro.

Since Leopard is now Universal for both PowerPC and Intel, this ended up working nicely. The one note, however, is that installer will complain about the partition table when it’s executing on an intel machine, but installing to a PowerPC disk. The installer thinks it’ll be booting from the drive, so it doesn’t like the Apple Partition Map, demanding a GPT table instead.

The solution is to set the CM_BUILD variable, allowing installation to the target disk.

  export CM_BUILD=CM_BUILD
  export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1
  export SRC="/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD"

  installer -verbose \
    -pkg "$SRC"/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg \
    -target "/Volumes/Macintosh HD 1/" \
    -lang en | tee /tmp/installer.log