Nigel has posted slides from our Macworld 2008 presentation on Puppet.
Please see: Puppet Macworld 2008 Project
I’ll post additional information once I find out the details of distribution of any audio/video recordings taken during the presentation.
I picked up a 250 Gig Western Digital Passport portable hard drive to keep a backup copy of my file vault home directory, among other things while I travel next week, in the somewhat-likely event something disastrous happens to my laptop.
I really like how small and portable the drive is, along with it’s USB bus powered interface. There’s no futzing around with wall warts and power supplies, it truly is plug and play.
I also really like that my PS3 recognizes the device, since I’ve transfered my entire iTunes library over to it (Huzzah, Option-Starting iTunes to select a library!). All of my H.264 AVC movies play right off of the drive on my Playstation 3 as well, which is really nice and convenient.
Copying some rather large files, specifically a 7 gig ASR Golden Master image of my demonstration PowerBook leopard OS, and the actual Leopard ISO image itself, I ran into a file size limitation of FAT32. Of course, I knew FAT32 didn’t support large files, but I’ve just been spoiled in recent years by things like this “just working.”
I didn’t want to reformat the small drive, because that would surely mean my Playstation 3 would no longer recognize the file system, so instead I opted to create a sparsebundle HFS+ formatted disk image, exactly like I would do manually for Leopard File Vault images.
The end result is that each “band” in the sparse bundle image will satisfy the limitations of FAT32, while providing a nice, secure and robust HFS+J file system to store all of the “big files” I need to carry with me.
Long live robust Disk Imaging Frameworks.
The only catch is that these files are only accessible on Mac OS X Leopard machines now, but that’s not a huge problem for me. Especially traveling to the MacWorld conference.
I usually compute with n-tupel of Mac computers sitting in front of me. I have a strong aversion to clutter, despite the state of my apartment, and the power of Teleport providing seamless, encrypted keyboard sharing, a-la so called “soft KVM” utilities is a killer app for me.
Alas, I’ve found that Teleport does not work as expected when operating from an NFS Mounted Home Directory.
Trying to connect to my Laptop, nutburner (Yes, nutburner is the given name of my first generation MacBook Pro), I received the following error.
UNKNOWN wants permission to sign using key “privateKey” in your keychain. Do you want to allow this?
On a working host, e.g. two machines with file vault home folders, that “UNKNOWN” will actually display as “teleportd”. I suspect whatever logic Apple is using to verify the authenticity of program binaries doesn’t work as expected over NFS.
After clicking “Always Allow” twice, I get the following error:
I synchronize my login.keychain, so the private key and certificate are identical between these two hosts, leading me to believe a certificate algorithm mismatch is unlikely.
In any event, my solution was to simply redirect the teleport.prefPane to a local HFS+ volume using a symbolic link.
# /Scratch is a local HFS+ volume. mkdir -p /Scratch/mccune/Library/PreferencePanes mv ~/Library/PreferencePanes/teleport.prefPane \ /Scratch/mccune/Library/PreferencePanes/ ln -s /Scratch/mccune/Library/PreferencePanes/teleport.prefPane \ ~/Library/PreferencePanes/teleport.prefPane
Once teleport.prefPane resided on a local HFS volume, everything “just worked” perfectly.
As an alternative, you could deploy the prefPane to /Library/PreferencePanes to make teleport available to all users of the system.
I haven’t posted in awhile, mainly because I’ve been preoccupied with a relatively long and relaxing vacation over the winter break where I largely ignored all things technology.
I’ve been preparing for Macworld 2008, where Nigel Kersten and I will be presenting some demonstrations and technical details about our respective Puppet deployments at Google and Ohio State University.
If you’ll be attending Macworld, feel free to follow my Twitter feed. I don’t post much at the moment, though I believe it’ll really come in handy during the fast and furious pace of a week long conference like Macworld.
Some other links for gratuitous self promotion:
Please leave a comment if you’ll be attending Macworld this year.