Spidle Blog

I had fun over winter break freaking out the college kids who work for us by booting an Xserve from an iPod.  Is this easily possible by any other OS?  It took me approximately 15 minutes to clone an OS X Server install DVD image to my 80gig iPod.  Then hook the iPod up to the Xserve via a Firewire cable.  Finally select the iPod as the boot disk and restart the server.

You may be saying cool, but why would you do this?  Main reason, was because I was updating the server to Leopard server.  Leo server only comes on a DVD.  The Xserve G5 only has a CD optical drive in it.  Second, I don’t use the iPod and it was a free 80gig storage device with Firewire connection.

To take it one step further…  I wanted to do an upgrade install.  This would not work because the Xserve had a striped RAID and would not upgrade to Apple RAID 2.0.  So I had to make a disk image of the boot drive.  Copy it to the iPod.  Boot from the iPod/OSXS Leopard Install disk, destroy the RAID.  Create a new striped RAID with Leopard, then restore the boot disk image back to the drive.  Then the Leopard upgrade went off without a hitch.

Gotta love the ease of Apple products.

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My big present for the year was this http://tinyurl.com/7xmthl a double-bass drum pedal for our drumset at home.  Lately I’ve been playing the drum set at church around once a week, just playing around, and really liked the double-bass pedal setup.  I’ve never learned to play double-bass and thought that would be something fun to have.

So that is what the family bought me for Christmas.  The pedal and a book to learn how to play it.  It is actually really fun and is a pretty good leg work out.  One of these days I’ll do some recording and put it up here.

Overall we had a very good Christmas.  It seems that our boys got everything they asked for.  It wasn’t too hectic seeing relatives, and it was spread out over 4 days.  My brother came back from Denver and it was good to see him too.  

Since I only had the 25th and 26th off my break was short but it was just long enough for me.  Now I’m ready for the new year.

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I worked on this little project for work, but thought it would be nice to release this to the public.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/opendirectorygr/

Mark

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I threw this little script together this morning so we can display various network and server monitoring pages in Safari on a (lamp) iMac. It was kind of fun getting back into Applescript again.

================================
– Author name: mspidle
– Creation date: 10/10/2008
–
– Description: This script launches Safari and opens specified URLs in separate
–                tabs.  Then once open it will cycle through the tabs after the
–                specified wait time.  This was created for our NOC computer, to
–                show pretty graphs on a big screen.
–
–

– Enter each URL you want to load in a separate tab
set urlList to {”http://techcomm/mrtg/bd.html”, “http://techcomm/cacti/graph_view.php?action=tree&tree_id=3″, “http://techcomm/NetworkStatistics/”}
set numURLs to (count urlList)

tell application “Safari”
    activate
    set cWindow to first item of windows
    global seconds_to_delay
    –Specify how many seconds to display each tab
    set seconds_to_delay to 5
    set the URL of tab 1 of cWindow to (item 1 of urlList)
   
    repeat with i from 2 to (numURLs)
        tell cWindow to make new tab
        set the URL of tab i of cWindow to (item i of urlList)
    end repeat
   
   
   
    tell application “Safari”
        repeat
            repeat with i from 1 to the count of tabs of cWindow
                tell cWindow to set current tab to tab i
                delay seconds_to_delay
            end repeat
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell
====================================

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So last night while watching the news I thought I saw somebody walk by our bedroom door, then I heard the person sneeze, which startled me.  I still wasn’t sure if I saw someone walking but then heard loud footsteps and I knew someone was up so I got up to investigate.

I checked the bathroom, no one there, so I checked the boys rooms.  All there except our middle child.  ??? I go back to the bathroom, no, still no one in there.  So slight panic creeps in a little bit.  I tell Debbie I can’t find him so she goes to the bathroom and no, still no one in there.  As she goes to his bedroom I take off down the stairs to check the rest of the house.

Once downstairs I call his name but no answer.  I then see that the door to the garage is open and the garage light is on.  OK a little more panic takes over.  I call his name again and he walks into the house.  I asked him what he was doing, and he mumbles something unintelligible, like sleeping/sweeping/swiffering ???  I say “OK, go back to bed.” at which he takes off up the stairs back to his bed.

Debbie met him part way and I tell her, he is sleepwalking.  Once he is back in bed, he starts laughing.  Debbie tells him goodnight and covers him up.  We then blockade his door with a hamper so we’ll at least hear him move this if he gets up again.

Let’s just say it took me a while to go to sleep after that.  Of course Debbie blames me for this, I’ve had numerous sleepwalking episodes in my life and a few when I was his age, grade school.  The most memorable ones I’m told are of me trying to get out the front door of the house, and another time opening the freezer door which thawed everything in there.

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I took apart my first flat panel iMac last night. (this our church theater presentation machine) I upgraded the HD from the stock 160gig to a 750gig.

Getting the front bezel off was a challenge. The scariest part was when I got to the instructions in the take apart that said place hands on hard drive and pull HARD!!! Yes, that is correct, all caps and 3 exclamation points. Instructions like that always make me a little nervous.

I had some heart stopping moments turning the machine back on too.
First try, oops forgot to plug power cable intoback of iMac.
Second try, oops forgot to plug power cable into wall.
Third try, external Lacie drive came on but no video, ugh.
Fourth try, yay, iMac boots from, Lacie drive and everything works.

See the pics:

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In 9 weeks or around 45 working days we’ve accomplished a ton of work and projects. Here are the highlights.

• Gathered and sent off 280 computers to the refurb company.
• Received and inventoried 300 + new computers.
• Removed everything from 2 of our 3 racks and installed a replacement rack (this was done in a 10 hour period).
• Created a new Leopard image for all district Macs.
• Created a new Leopard server image for our building servers.
• Received 9 new Intel Xserves and installed.
• Cascaded 8 G5 Xserves to building servers.
• Figured out how to deploy a dual boot lab of 20″ iMacs. Booting Mac OS X and Windows XP., then deployed the images.
• Created a fresh Windows XP image to be deployed on 6 building Mac minis for food service checkin, then deployed these.
• Deployed the 08-09 Leopard image to 1600 Macs in the district.
• Cleaned all district computers.
• Updated our FileMaker server from version 7 to version 9.
• Upgraded our TechTools Pro installation.
• Upgraded our MySQL server from version 4.x to 5.x
• and lots more things I can’t remember at the moment…

This was all done while working in the middle of a new high school that is being constructed around us. We had to change parking lots 3 times, paths to get to our office at least 3 times. Contend with, construction dust, chemical smells, water pipes leaking, floors being finished, torrential rain flooding, floors being waxed, fire alarm testing, and much much more.

I’ll be glad when school starts and we can take a rest. (ha, like that will happen) Then the real fun starts, End User Support.

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Here are some fun photos from my office area. This post gives me a chance to try out the Wordpress iPhone app too.

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http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1130.html

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