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Missing OD Attributes

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A while back, when 10.5 first shipped, my boss and I were intrigued by iCal Server. And after getting it going, we found that for some reason, we couldn’t set a calendar server for our users. We’d set the calendar in Workgroup Manager (WGM hereafter), hit save, and right after that, WGM would uncheck the box, and set it back to none. Something was weird with our accounts. My boss deleted his account and recreated it, and that fixed it. So, the problem was obviously something with the “old” accounts on the system (e.g. the accounts that had been migrated from 10.1 -> 10.2 -> 10.3 -> 10.4 -> 10.5. Some attribute didn’t get added.

At first glance, the obvious missing one was there was only one authAuthority entry in our user accounts. Just the ApplePasswordServer entry, no Kerberosv5 entry. And deleting and recreating his account remedied that. So, I put it on the back burner because we figured out that iCal Server was kinda buggy, and later found out that the iPhone couldn’t write to it, just read (no good). When 10.6 was announced, and we heard that iCal Server 2 supported read/write from the iPhone (with version 3.x+ of the iPhone software), I started thinking about it again. So, I looked at the attribute, and figured out that a single “sed” would create the attribute I needed. So, I coded up this. And figured, problem solved.

Alas, it was not. While testing a migration of 10.4 email (cyrus) to a 10.6 server (dovecot) using the migrate_mail_data.pl script, I noticed at the end, the script renames the imap spool folders after the user’s UUID. It failed to rename them for several users (like me) because we didn’t have a UUID. Then it hit me, iCal Server’s URLs contain the UUID for the user. No UUID, no iCal Server calendar. DOH! So, I took the Kerberos script, changed it a bit (using uuidgen), and batch added UUIDs for all the users that didn’t have them (Script here. Re-ran the migrate_mail_data.pl script, and viola, all the spools got renamed. Now, I’m not sure if this really fixes the iCal Server 1 problem, since I don’t have an iCal Server set up, but iCal Server 2 works (though, it works differently, so this issue doesn’t occur). I also got word from a bug I filed about the initial issue, that Apple thinks 10.6 fixed it, so I’d imagine when you upgrade your OD server to 10.6, it adds missing attributes.

More later, work related. Thought I should keep topics distinct.

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. =/

Today

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Today at work was fairly boring, save the fact that at 4:30am this morning, a drive died in one of the arrays. So it’s been rebuilding with the spare since then. Should be done by about 8pm tonight. It’s a 3.6TB array with 750gig PATA drives, so rebuilds take a while.

Thankfully, we have an extended service contract with the Apple on the array, so a replacement is free, and was shipped from either Portland or Seattle today. Should be able to replace it tomorrow. Turns out, these can be ordered from the campus repair shop, which is an Apple Authorized Service Center. Otherwise, Apple wanted to put a $1070 hold on my Credit Card until they got the old one back. =[

More work with ACE today. Again, can’t comment on much. But, progress is being made. =) Otherwise, no comment. =)

Today we also moved over a server from another department that we’re now hosting their hardware, which hosts their website(s). Pretty easy move. It’s a G5 tower, so the hope is to migrate it to something in the rack, or better, migrate it to our primary web server. Least we have the power and space in the room. Worst case, I might just put the tower on top of the rack.

Word on the street is the state legislature is going to approve our $7.5 million in bonds which will match the private donations we’ve gotten at work. This will give us a building expansion, remodel the remainder of the 2nd and 3rd floor, and replace all the windows with double glazed windows (our current windows are circa 1950, so the building leaks like a sieve, and dust builds up everywhere). Interesting part, the bonds would need to be used by the end of the 2009-2011 fiscal year. So, construction is probably going to need to start by next summer at the latest. Next summer and year is going to be… “fun”, but well worth it.

I’ve added a couple sections to the site. I hope to open up the Code section when I have something there, and to populate more of the “Plants” section. Basically I just excluded that category from the front page with a single line of php () in the post loop of the index_template.php (link). Here’s hoping. I have a couple other sections I need to start populating as well. Think I’ll do the same for the reviews section.

Also been playing with the iPhone Configuration Utility 2 for our faculty/staff that have iPhones. Overall, it’s extremely cool. We can create a template for each user, or just a generic one that sets up LDAP for an email directory, as well as set up a calendar server. Once 10.6 is out, we’re going to set up iCal Server 2, and get everyone onto that. Then we’ll finally be able to kill MeetingMaker. Once we can kill the Quark License Server (i.e. once we get rid of Quark), and we get rid of the APWire Satellite feed (which the software that parses the feed runs at 100% CPU, all the time), I might be able to basically decommission a server due to lack of services, rather than consolidation.

Alright, that’s it for now. Again, hope to post some about home in the next few days. But not a whole lot has gone on, so it’s kinda difficult to write about.

TTFN.