Back in July 2011 one of the stock Western Digital HD’s in my 2009 Mac Mini Server went out, so I bit the bullet and purchased two new Western Digital Scopio Blacks (both 500GB), and RAID1’d them together. Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, and my RAID goes offline. I run several days of block checking, and find that the upper drive has gone out (which, I’ll get replaced by WD, but at this point, I’m looking to replace both drives… and I generally don’t trust refurbished drives). Anyway, figuring two new 500GB drives would cost about $100, I started looking at alternatives, and quickly found the Crucial M500 240GB SSD for $140 through Amazon. I then wouldn’t RAID drives together, I would just put OS/Services on the SSD, then use the still functional 500GB Western Digital drive as storage for larger files (downloads, backups, etc).
LOM Shark
We’re still using Xserves, and thankfully two of them are the last revision. Unfortunately, one of those two got stuck booting the other day ((Pressed power, network lights would cycle every 5 seconds or so, but never got all the activity lights to cycle, etc)), and having dealt with this in the past, I knew LOM (Lights Out Management) can be the cause. So, I unplugged the server, and let it sit overnight. Next morning, it still wouldn’t boot.
So, I pulled the machine and tried in another location. It booted.
So the only thing I can figure is that LOM must get enough voltage/current over the network connections to keep it “alive”, and moving the machine disconnected that last lifeline.
So, moral: If LOM is being difficult, unplug power and network, and let things sit for a few minutes.
Silly LOM.
Adobe Licensing Failure
Like pretty much every other Mac systems administrator in the country/world who deals with Adobe, I’ve had my fair share of annoyances. This last couple weeks, there’s been a new one where CS6 just magically forgets its license, and reverts to trial mode, except in my lab case where users can’t launch the license manager, so the app they’re trying to launch just cycles and quits.
Adobe just today announced the “fix” ((I use quotes because Adobe has basically said they’re not 100% positive because reproducing the issue for them has been inconsistent. Which makes sense since only maybe 5% at most of the machines in our labs have had this issue)), as annoying as it is here. It’s a bit annoying that it took them so long to resolve, and even more annoying that it took them several days to even acknowledge that there was a problem, but at least there’s a fix, and I won’t have to re-image all the labs in the process. The long and short of it, is that the Photoshop 13.0.2 and 13.0.3 update apparently corrupted the license database to a point where something stopped working. I’m not sure if it was date related as well (so when the year rolled over, it was an issue, or not).
Anyway, I’m going to roll out the fix myself on Monday when the building is empty (we’re having a power outage for a good portion of the day, then the rest of the day should be free for me to make some changes).
Special thanks to Greg Neagle’s always awesome blog Managing OS X. If not for it, I would have pretty much felt alone with this issue, and probably not had the power behind me to push Adobe toward a fix… thankfully Greg is rather influential. =)