68 days ago
Turns out Time Machine is not just for accidentally deleted files — it works great for restoring a Mac from bare metal, too. Even over the network.
James Duncan Davidson’s instructions for using the OSX Leopard install DVD to boot and restore from a Time Machine backup work great if you back up to a USB or FireWire drive.
But I use Time Machine over the network, so my backup set wasn’t available. Nedospasov had the secret for mounting the network backup share first.
Here’s the whole process…
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99 days ago
So the Mac OS X 10.5.3 update broke Time Machine for me.
The update did fix Time Machine backups over the network for many people, but not for me. Lots of folks have tried various things to fix the problem (like standing on their head, reformatting, fingering prayer beads). Here’s what fixed Time Machine over AFP for me.
I had a setup that was backing up perfectly on 10.5.2.
After the 10.5.3 update, Time Machine said “The backup volume could not be mounted” — again and again. Console’s system log showed backupd errors 18 and sometimes 19.
The problem, believe it or not, was permissions and my .mac credentials. Here’s how to fix it.
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156 days ago
Both Apache 2.2 and PHP 5 come with every installation of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. MySQL does not. There are a couple of tricks for installing and/or turning them on —and thereby attaining Development Happiness.
Here’s how we configure our development machines at the studio, where our PHP work is primarily Drupal and we use several virtual hosts.
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156 days ago
MySQL now provides compiled binaries for Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard. But the startup applet doesn’t work properly yet on Leopard.
So here’s how to install MySQL on Leopard and start it using launchd — the standard Leopard way. These instructions should work for both Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5).
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156 days ago
So you want to use Git for distributed version control. For Mac OS X 10.5 there are a couple of options for installing Git.
- Fink packages an almost up-to-date version, named simply
git
- MacPorts packages an up-to-date version as
git-core
Either of these methods, though, installs lots of dependencies. Which requires lots of compile time. And lots of disk space — especially for the MacPorts version.
So I prefer to compile Git myself — and use Fink for dependencies. Here’s how I do it.
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211 days ago
Leopard does not (yet?) backup to a disk attached to an Airport base station, to lots of people’s concern. But OS X version 10.5.1 will backup over the network — to another Mac. It works just fine over wired or wifi networks, so it works for MacBooks.
Initial setup is easy, but there are two non-obvious tricks to getting this to work.
Update 31 May 2008: Since Leopard 10.5.3, Time Machine no longer requires any of this — it mounts backup shares when needed, so you don’t have to do anything. Once you get Time Machine working again, that is. If you’re having troubles since the 10.5.3 update, read A Fix for Time Machine on OSX 10.5.3 over AFP for .mac Users, a how-to that will get you going again.
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419 days ago
We’ve been testing online backup software here at el-Studio for a while now. Remarkable how the slipping of the little rubber band inside our tape drive — the one that connects the motor with the thingy that spins the tape — brings online backups to mind.
Plus there’s the appeal of saying “We backup to the cloud, man.”
Anyway, our favorite online backup software/service is Mozy.
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421 days ago
I bought my wife an iPhone. After her first day, Laura was changing the ringtone.
The magnitude of this? Well, Laura is not a settings-changer. There are folks out there — options hounds like, well, me — who when they first install new software beeline for Apple-comma or Tools > Options, just to prowl around and see what we can mess up.
In Laura’s world, settings interfere with getting the job done — or so I thought.
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