Tony Baltazar

Free Software / Ruby / Security / Arsenal Football Club

Archive for category Apple

rubyninja Mac Mini upgrade

Jan 11

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It’s been about 3 months since I purchased and upgraded rubyninja to the lasted Apple Mac Mini, and I must say my new mid 2010 Mac Mini computer completely blows away my previous 1.6 GHz Core Duo 2006 Mac Mini model. With a 2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, this is by far my most powerful computer. Upgrading the memory from the factory 2GB to 8GB of RAM (Crucial) also helped increase performance. Immediatly after getting my new Mac Mini online, I downloaded VirtualBox and restored my previous state of rubyninja.net to a CentOS VirtualBox instance, in addition of installing new instances of CentOS, RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and Windows Server 2003.

At less than $700.00 (including the 8GB RAM upgrade), I think a Mac Mini is a really good investment for anyone wanting to have a reliable computer that you want to have function as a hypervisor for testing or development. The only downside to the Mac Mini is Mac OS X Lion it self. I’ve read plenty of horror stories on how Lion is Apple’s equivalent of Windows Vista, but man; though when using the Mac Mini, 99% of the time I’m using the Linux/Unix VirtualBox instances. The other 1% percent of the time I’m using Lion, is through the built-in VNC server that Lion ships with, and I have to say it is an absolute pile of shit or nicer words, it is simply broken (which is an known issue). Thus said, at least on the hardware side of things, having used Apple Mac Mini computers as servers for almost 8 years now, I’m expecting my new computer to be rock solid for plenty years to come.

Sad farewell to my first Apple Intel computer

Oct 29

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After over 5 years, I finally said goodbye to my very first Intel Apple computer. Up to this day, my former 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo Mac Mini was and still is a rock solid machine. With a stock 60 GB 5400 rpm drive and a shocking 512MB of RAM, the Mac Mini was my first modern Mac experience, since in the past my only Apple computer experience was using the Macintosh Classic or Macintosh Plus. Since at the time I didn’t knew crap about computers, but I definitively remember using a keyboarding/typing program and a Wheel of Fortune game. Shortly after buying the Mac Mini, I upgraded it to 2GB of RAM and to a 500 GB 5400 rpm hard drive and most importantly installed CentOS on it, then it was no turning back. For the last 4+ years, the Mac Mini has been my local LAMP and file server. I had absolute zero issues with the computer functioning as a server and I estimate having the Mac Mini powered on for almost 2 years straight. However, the Mini was not powerful enough to run virtual machines smoothly. I tried using QEMU/XEN, but the computer completed choked. Although this was not the reason why I got rid of the computer, it was definitely a big limitation on it, since I didn’t want to build a big, noise custom PC to use as a hypervisor; I loved the absolute quietness of a Mac Mini. The final axed on getting rid off my Mac Mini was the fact that my little niece and nephews’ PC was an absolute piece of crap. I flat out got sick of supporting their really old PC, so instead of fixing their computer for the 20th time, I gave them my Mac Mini. An old Intel Mac Mini combined with Snow Leopard, in my opinion is the best solution for any elementary and middle school student that needs a reliable and stable computer.

Now, I’m planning on buying the latest Mac Mini model (2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, at the time of the writing) and planning on turning it into a hypervisor, using VirtualBox.

watch command line utility for alternative for Mac OS X: (Solved by MacPorts)

Sep 23

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Since I use all Apple Mac OS X as my primary desktop operating system of choice, I wrote a ruby script ago that mimics the GNU/Linux watch command on OS X a couple of months ago (watch.rb). Little that I knew that the watch package is available within MacPorts.

In short MacPorts is an free and open source package management system built into OS X. (Essentially the BSD UNIX port system). The awesome thing about MacPorts is that it lets you install traditional UNIX userland applications that are not included by default by OS X like wget, and watch.
http://www.macports.org

watch command line utility for alternative for Mac OS X

Jul 4

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I recently purchased the book Practical Ruby for System Administration by Ben Hamou and one of the cool Ruby one-liner command line expressions is one that mimics the watch command.
ruby -e 'system "clear; df -h" while sleep 1'

Just like the author, for quite a while I’ve been kind of annoyed by the fact that Apple doesn’t include this really useful command line utility. So inspired by the one-liner script, I hacked a small watch command line alternative for OS X.

Download watch.rb
sudo cp watch.rb /usr/local/bin
wacht.rb ‘UNIX command‘

New Primary laptop

May 3

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It’s been over a week since I purchased my new 13 in MacBook Pro, and I finally managed to fully transfer all of my files from my old white plastic MacBook. Even though I bought the Core 2 Duo instead of the 15 in i5 MacBook Pro, this laptop is by and the the best machine I’ve ever owned. The only problem is the stock 2 GB that the laptop come with. It is very noticeable when I have VirtualBox running in the background. So I’m planning on upgrading the RAM to 4 GB within a month so.

Computer upgrades

Jan 10

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I finally upgraded the hard drives on my MacBook, Mac Mini (Server), and my main desktop Mac Mini.

Macbook (Leopard)
For some strange reason, I wasn’t able to clone my existing Leopard system to the new 500 GB as the clone process failed about 10% – 15% completion. So I just backed up all my files and installed Snow Leopard from scratch.

Mac Mini (Leopard)
Unlike with my MacBook, cloning the existing Leopard system to the new hard drive worked flawlessly on my desktop Mac Mini.
After that, upgrading to Snow Leopard worked like a charm.

Mac Mini (CentOS)
Upgrading the RAM on the Mini to 2 GB was simple, the hard drive upgrade was a completely different story. First, I wasn’t able to find any open source program that would allow me to clone to an attach mass storage USB drive. Unless I didn’t read the documentation properly, both CloneZilla and FOG only allow the clone output image to be saved on a network system and not locally, even if its a different hard drive.

Little that I knew. dd was everything I needed to clone the hard drive.
commands I used:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

After the dd copy was finished, I rebotted to the new hard drive only to find out that /dev/sda5 , /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda7 were not copied properly to the new hard drive. So I had to reboot into rescue mode using the original CentOS install DVD and ran the following commands:
dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/dev/sdb5
dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/dev/sdb6
dd if=/dev/sda7 of=/dev/sdb7

On my second reboot to the new 500 GB hard drive, Linux was able to boot perfectly fine with all my original settings!!! Until… I opened up fdisk only to find out that I wasn’t able to add partition (I had over 400 GB of free space in the drive) because I wasnt able to modify my existing partition table that consisted of 3 primary partions and 1 extended partition that consisted of three logic partitions within it. So I just download the live GParted program and I was able to created the additional 400 GB logical drive from there.

On the third attempt to boot into the new 500 GB hard drive, Linux had to do filesystem check to /dev/sda7 which happened to be my /home partition. The fsck completely wiped out all of the contents that was in my home directory. Which wasn’t a big of a deal since I already had a full backup of all my files.

Conclusion
Overall upgrading the hard drive on a Mac Mini running CentOS was really painful, but I had the feeling that it could have been worse.

CentOS
GParted Live CD

-Alpha01

Chalie Miller is my hero

Dec 3

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Almost three years later

Nov 30

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I finally got an iPhone.

End of an Era

Jun 9

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Apple is finally killing PPC with Snow Leopard. This means within the next few months, I’ll probably be in search for a new PPC iMac to add to my network of computers.

OS X Leopard really innovating?

Nov 8

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I just finished watching a Leopard demo and one of the biggest features is virtual desktops!! This is absolutely ridiculous because I’ve been using virtual desktop on Linux for a really long time now. And it is funny because I’ve been also been using virtual desktops in Tiger for quite some time now. I really hate how Apple markets their products claiming that there innovated everything, especially when it comes to virtualization.

Desktop Manager