macOS


03

Aug 2023

Moving a user’s home or CloudStorage wants a lot of space

Why would we do this We have several customers that use various cloud sync/storage options as another location for archived data.  Once the projects are complete and we mark them read-only on the Xsan, they can be written to tape and sent to “the cloud” for further redundancy.  This means we are almost constantly sending data up to these providers.   In macOS Monterey (and...

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30

Jun 2023

Monitoring and killing smbd

We have several clients using macOS to share data from their Xsans. There have been occasional instances where the smbd process spins up to over 100% and seems to get hung up. Connected users report slow file browsing or not able to navigate to new folders. New connections timeout before being prompted for authentication.We have found that killing the smbd process resolves the issue and...

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20

Jan 2023

Moving to M1/arm native rsync

We are in the process of replacing Intel Mac minis with M1 Mac minis in our customers’ server rooms.  For the MDCs we are using migration assistant and rebuilding the Open Directory master first, then migrating the BMDC and cleaning up the Xsan configuration and re-joining the Xsan.  For other systems (file servers, sync servers, etc) one of main tools for data movement is rsync...

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18

Jan 2023

Creating an html file list of an archive

We recommend our clients use a Production -> Nearline -> Archive workflow.  Production data is synced to Nearline (full copy nightly, syncs every hour).  Then when projects are complete, data is sent to duplicate tapes and cloud storage.  While people can view and search archives in the cloud or the Archiware P5 web interface, often they like to navigate in the file system they are...

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29

Nov 2022

Converting local accounts to mobile accounts

When working with an Xsan volume with Access Control Lists (ACLs) enabled, it is critical that users log into their Macs with the accounts that are in the relevant groups.  We recently helped a customer migrate  several computers from local accounts to mobile accounts while retaining the user’s home folder. We are starting with a Mac with a local administrator account and another local account...

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04

May 2022

Another ARD offline issue

We have a lot of headless Mac Minis in server racks running Xsans and related services.  So we use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) quite a bit to connect and work on them.  For most of their history, a Mac Mini without a monitor was limited to low desktop resolutions (like 1280×1024 or even 1024×768), could lose any graphics acceleration from the Quartz Core Graphics framework,...

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20

Dec 2021

Apple Remote Desktop constant resizing

We use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) for many things from working on headless servers to remote users working on Xsan connected systems while working from home.  Occasionally, we run into a problem when connecting to a remove system via ARD where the window wildly resizes itself and eventually errors out. In some cases the cause seems to be a user changing the resolution of the...

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01

Dec 2021

No login window icon if your UID is too large

We ran into an interesting problem on some of our Xsan connected systems.  We created mobile accounts, but some of them wouldn’t show up at the Mac’s Login Window. These Macs are bound to an LDAP server and the user’s UniqueID (UID) comes from the LDAP server.  The UIDs are assigned based on user type, so while employees are small numbers, contractors have ended up...

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