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Flash player and network homes on Mac OS 10.5+

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So, along the lines of my previous post, today I decided to look into Flash Player performance on 10.5 clients with a 10.5.8 server, using network home directories.

I had noticed a couple days ago that users playing youtube videos got occasional skips and stops in the video. This is on a brand new Intel iMac, with 2gb of ram. It should easily be able to handle a non-full screen, non-HD youtube video. Doing a `fs_usage AppleFileServer | grep <username>` (where <username> is the username of the user logged in) on our AFP server showed a LOT of traffic to ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/… First, seems like Adobe hasn’t touched that part of the Flash player code, if it’s still writing to a “Macromedia” folder. Second, why the hell is it caching information in the Preferences folder?! That’s what ~/Library/Caches is for (which I already redirect). But, I know there’s been a lot of complaining in the past about Flash caching data in non-standard places that aren’t affected by clearing the browser cache.

So, given that amount of traffic it was producing, I figured that was probably the cause (what a leap!), so, I open up the NHR scripts I use, and add a redirect for that folder to the local HD, and install those on the client. Guess what? No more Flash Player skips or stops on network home users.

At this point, I’ve copied those changes out to all our clients, and dropped them into our DeployStudio workflow (for machines that we image between now and the next image update). On the plus side, this should result in a sizable decrease in server IO and network traffic in the case of a whole class watching Flash videos.

So, once again, shoddy programming. The only caveat I can think with this would be any install bases that are using Macromedia Dreamweaver (already checked Dreamweaver CS3, and it doesn’t write to that folder), or maybe Macromedia Director. If you’re running those, I’d recommend just redirecting the “Flash Player” folder within the Macromedia folder. But, I’m not positive those other programs write to that folder, it’s just a guess.

So, good luck.

UPDATE: So, a student came up to me today and said Pandora stopped working. Looking into the issue, it looks like the newest full release of Flash doesn’t really like this “hack”. So, after beating my head against the wall for 2 hours with this, I decided “what the hell” and installed the beta of Flash player that adobe just released (which is Intel only, even though it claims to be a Universal Binary in the installer, and the Plugin itself), and what do you know, it fixed the issue. So, my guess at this point is Adobe is just slowly updating Macromedia’s code, and they found/fixed this issue while fixing something else (since they don’t support Network Homes).

Short week

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While at the beach, I got an email from AppleCare basically saying they were closing my case because I had sent in an FYI saying things were working. They took that as a “issue resolved”. So, a few emails flew back and forth Monday, then I didn’t hear anything else. So, I sent a rather angry email Tuesday night and CC’d my Sales Engineer. That got some attention, and they reopened the case (there are other reasons too, but I NDA and all). The biggest pisser is the previous person I was working with was removed from the case, so now I’m dealing with someone else. Hopefully the miscommunication, and the rather guarded phone conversation on Friday are only due to his call being monitored… we’ll see. Anyway, they’ve said that they aren’t going to close the case until the issue is resolved in an official capacity. That was the crappy part of the week.

The better parts of the week were getting the new Xserve on Monday (I didn’t get to set it up until Wednesday). Once I got it in the rack, I can say honestly, it’s hella fast. I’ve had it running BOINC (setiathome) since Wednesday, and managed to get astropulse running on it, and it’s cranking through work units. It has 8 cores, with Hyperthreading. So, BOINC sees it as 16 cores. For some reason, it won’t use more than 8, so it’s running at 50% capacity, and still managing to blow the socks off of other machines I’ve used. It also uses less power than the older generation Xserves. It also chugs through encoding. While Handbrake doesn’t seem to take advantage of it, using MPEGStreamclip encoded an 8 minute video as H.264 in about a minute. Can’t wait until 10.6 rolls and we see GPU acceleration in Quicktime encoding.

Also got a new test server, in the form of a new Mac Mini. It’s pretty sweet for a Intel Core 2 Duo. It’s only 2.0ghz, but it seems to have Hyperthreading (VMWare sees 4 processors). I haven’t been able to get 10.5 Server Guest OS’s on it yet since we only got a Mini with 1gig of RAM. RAM should arrive tomorrow ($65 for 4gig of ram). I’m hoping to run 3 guest OS’s on there pretty regularly (one for Plone 3 development, one for Plone 2.5 testing (mirror of our current site), and one for 10.6 testing). What I did find pretty cool is that on at least Intel machines, or it may be 10.5, if you have 10.5 client installed, and put in a 10.5 server disk, you can click install, and go through the install without rebooting. After it’s installed, you run software update, it downloads the latest version of server, and then reboot. Boom, you have 10.5 server.

Last week I also finally implemented quotas on the SAN. I did this mainly because one of the LUNs on the SAN was down to about 10% free space (even though the SAN as a whole has about 40% available). This is due to the fact we only have 3 storage LUNs on the SAN. Ideally it should be even numbers. I’d love to buy new storage, but that’s about $15k we don’t really have. =/

Implementing quotas entitled a lot of steps. Since we didn’t have them enabled for the past 2 years, there were about 200 users that were over the quota I was setting. Rather than just setting them all to 4gig, and forcing them to delete work before they could function, I wrote up some scripting that would set those 200 users quotas to 1gig over what they were currently using, and then set a time limit to expire on Oct 15, 2009; at which time their quota would revert to 4gig. The script then sent out emails to those users stating what they were using, what their quota was, and that on 10/15/09, it would set down to 4gig. The more active users have already started clearing off data. I did receive an email from a user claiming they weren’t using that much… of course, I ran a `du` on their user directory, and showed that in fact, they were using that much data.

For all the other users that were under quota, I just set normal 4gig quotas. The only other thing I’m considering is to have the quotas for all those users who are over quota currently shrink down nightly so that it remains 1gig more than their current usage until it reaches 4gig. That way, they can’t delete stuff now, then fill back up the space again. But, it might be moot since they’ll be forced to be at 4gig come Oct 15th anyway.

Now, by Oct 15th, I need to have a script in place that grabs quota data from LDAP, and sets it on the SAN nightly. I also need to make sure all the LDAP quotas are set to 4gig. I’m not sure why Apple didn’t make Xsan look at LDAP for quota info (maybe a latency thing?), but it’s not that difficult to code up something that does that. Ideally, I want it to check the quotas already set, and only set those not already in place… then it won’t be writing 1600 quotas every night, but only at most, a few. I haven’t tested yet whether quotas can be set on the SAN for users that don’t have any data on the SAN… this would be nice so I could potentially set quotas before users have a chance to start writing data (then they won’t be able to go over quota). If I can implement this “diff quota”, I might be able to have the script run hourly rather than nightly. I did write a webpage where people can check their quota… I hope to improve it with a login, as well as a way to see what’s so big on their account.

That’s about all I have for the work week. It was a pretty productive week given that I was only there for 3 days, and one of the days was largely me playing with the new Xserve. Home related stuff here soon. Tara and I have been building something spiffy.

UPDATE
I am mistaken on the Hyperthreading ability of the 09 Mac Mini. It’s showing 4 processors in VMWare because I copied over the .app from a machine that did have 4 processors. I didn’t think this data would be stored in the .app, but I guess it is.

For the record, since it’s nearly impossible to find without other software, the ’09 Mac Mini 2.0ghz, has a P7350 CPU. The details of which can be found here.

You’ll also note that the P7350 does NOT support VT. So, using the Mini as a VMware or Parallels host is probably not the best idea. It’s going to be slower than using something that does support VT. I can say it works, but it doesn’t work as well as machines that do have VT. =/

Memorial Day Weekend

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So, after my last post, I figured I’d give an update on that issue as well as other projects for the coming weekend.

As to my last post, there’s cautiously good news. My Apple SE escalated the case to AppleCare Enterprise, who have been very good about gathering the needed data, and keeping me updated as to the status of the issue. So, this last Tuesday, after a weekend of running with 10.5.7 and having a really crappy day Tuesday of trying to make things work, I decided I would downgrade back to 10.5.4. Well, after 3 hours of wiping the two servers, and installing 10.5.4 and things looking good, the next day we still had issues. Better, but not by much. So, I heard from AppleCare Enterprise that day (Wednesday, which I took off), and I got him the info he needed that night, and Thursday. Today, seemingly, Engineering thinks they have a fix. Bad news is, it might not make it into 10.5 but rather 10.6. But, they’re going to try. So, goodish news on that front.

Also for the past week (since 10.5.7), we’ve been having issues with a program called KeyAccess. Basically, this program allows us to “key” an application, and install it on all the computers in the building, then a server piece basically keeps track of how many instances of the programs are running, and keeps that inline with how many licenses we own. It’s the best thing since sliced bread. Job would be extra impossible without it. So, 10.5.7 comes out, I install it in 4 labs, and things seem to work. Only, I only tested on Intel Macs. On the PPCs, KeyAccess doesn’t launch on the client, and therefore applications won’t run. So, I email the company that makes the software (Sassafras Software, Inc), and tell them what’s up, and we think we have a fix, until the next day, when it’s still happening. At that point, I email back, and they say they’ve also had word from another location having the same issue. So, at home I email back and forth with one of their people who is 3 hours ahead of me about the issue. I send some logs, and some ls output, and he basically says they’ll try to work on it in-house the next day. So, next day, I’m working with them, and they get some more info, and finally get the issue reproducible in house. Today, they send me a new build that seems to work. Say it’s a timing issue (not sure quite what they mean by that, whether it’s coming up before networking, or whether it’s not syncing with the server)… so, 2 days, bug fix. Gotta really love small companies (I’m guessing they have probably 12-15 people, at most).

On the home front, we planted a medium sized Daphne ordora ‘Marginata’, which is a “typical” winter daphne, in the space formerly occupied by the very unhealthy Rhododendron (which, I placed in a pot, and is doing much better now). Hopefully we’ll have some nice, knock you on your ass, daphne to smell come next February.

Blueberries are doing about the same, though they seem far less impacted by the warmer weather we’ve been having recently than they have in the past. Be that the mulch, or the older plants, I can’t say. But they seem VERY happy.

This weekend is probably really going to be a fair amount of cleaning the garage, yard work, and various household tasks. I’m going to weatherstrip the front door, maybe trim the door so it’ll clear a rug, which also means changing the threshold. I don’t think I’ll be doing the PRV, but I might try to at least dig the old one out so I can tackle it next week.

Oh, btw, I got some new pedals for my bike. They’re Nashbar (http://www.nashbar.com/) Highlander Pedals, which are rebranded Wellgo WAM-D10’s (Review: here). They’ve got a nice big platform for normal shoe riding (with great spikes to bite into your shoes) on one side, and MTB clipless on the other. So far, I’m very happy. Previously I was using the stock Shimano clipless pedals with plastic clipless platforms, which sucked. Now if I could just get my saddle to not kill me. Oh, and btw, the Nashbar version was $30. The Wellgo ones are $50.

BTW, my bike is a 2001 Bianchi Volpe. I’ve replaced the Saddle with a more comfortable one, the pedals (now), and the tires with some 28 x 700 Gatorskins (hard, but smooth and nearly puncture proof).

That’s all for now… maybe I’ll post more this weekend.