Dave Lachapelle

Okay, so after a few days of messing around, and reading various forums, I happened across a method of setting up Apple’s Time Machine software to work on my Ubuntu network share. I just wanted to document here for anyone else, who may have a hard time coming up with a solution.

I’ll start off with documenting my server-side setup a bit:

• I have LVM set up on my Ubuntu box thats formatted as ReiserFS.
• I also have Netatalk compiled and installed (with SSL libraries).
• The various required ports for AFP have been opened in my firewall.
• I created two shares under Netatalk, called “Fileserver” and “Zeke Backup”

And now, the steps I took to make it all work:

• Find a USB or Firewire drive, plug it in and format it (I called mine “Zeke Backup”). Alternatively, you could partition your drive, but I’m not going to get into that.
• Open up the Time Machine preference pane and configure it to use the drive you formatted.
• As soon as it starts its first backup, turn Time Machine off
• Close System Preferences and Time Machine if you have then open, then mount your network share (Fileserver in my case).
• Open a terminal and copy all the files (including hidden “dot” files) to your fileserver.
• Unmount your network share (“Fileserver”)
• Unmount the USB Drive
• Mount your network share (that should have the same name as your USB drive had)
• Open System preferences and turn Time Machine on.

Note: I do not recommend doing this if you aren’t on a lan with your fileserver, as the first backup will backup your whole hard drive and take a significant amount of time.

So, after a few days on Apple’s newest operating system, I believe I know have a more or less solid foundation on which to base an opinion. And that opinion is, OS X Leopard is definately a step in the right direction. right off the top, it is significantly more polished and seems like a more comlete version of OS X. With features that were lacking in previous versions, it is definately something all Mac users have been looking forward to for a long time.

The first thing that really impressed me was the speed at which Leopard runs. Its FAST. Granted, I have a Macbook Pro Dual Core 2.4, so anything will be fast, and Tiger definately didn’t seem slow, but since playing on Leopard, I can conclude it is significantly faster. Not just that, but it also has a lot less floating beach ball of death.

I’m sure by now though, anyone who is even remotely interested has heard of the hundreds of features in Leopard. All-in-all, I’d have to say its more of an upgrade than a new operating system. There is little thats actually changed much from Tiger, and all the additions are welcome. In fact, I’d have to say that some of the new additions I think should’ve been included in Tiger, but thats just me.

Overall, I’m impressed with the work Apple has done on Leopard, and definitely happy to have it.

I’ll be writing up a bit more info on Time Machine in a day or so, as I’m working on getting it working under Ubuntu.

So, I’m not the only one, there are a lot of excited people around waiting patiently for their copy of Leopard to arrive, myself included. I can’t honestly remember being this excited for an OS upgrade ever. The Apple community sure is different from the Microsoft one, in that people tend to stand behind the product and look forward to updates.

Anyway, I got an e-mail from Apple this morning stating that my copy has shipped and that it will arrive today! Whether or not it arrives still has to be seen, but nonetheless, I’m excited. For those of you non-believers out there, here’s a quick screenshot:

I also got confirmation today that Time machine will only work with local USB / Firewire / Internal hard drives, and will not work with network drives. I’m probably going to go hacking through the settings to find a way to make it work, simply because I don’t have a large enough external drive, but my fileserver with 1TB of hard drive space would make a great backup.

I’m not usually one to notice such things, but I happened to be hunting around the Apple website for someone I could rant at regarding Canadians and iPhones. I’d just love to know why we don’t have iPhones up here in Canada. I mean, we are connected to the US by one of the largest borders in the world. Seems like we kind of got “forgotten” up here, and no one knows anything about when or if they’ll ever make it up here.

Anyway, I’m off topic already…

I was on the Apple support site, and happened to notice a “Chat Now” link next to the typical Questions? Need Advice? Call blah blah… So, I clicked on it and got a page can not be found message. Interesting I thought, thats not like Apple. I reload the page, and lo and behold, its gone, but when I move my mouse around, the link fades in. Even more interesting I think to myself… I then load the page in Safari, and the link isn’t there at all, unless I move my mouse just right and happen to get the 2 pixels the link takes up. Seems like they’re hiding a new feature on the support website.

Here are a few screenshots I took of the sites, notice the difference I’ve outlined in red.

In Opera:

In Safari:

:

So, I’ve been insanely busy the last few weeks, and haven’t taken any time out of my busy schedule to write anything of interest here. I’ve been really busy with work and life, but I won’t bore you with the details of that…

I will however, take a few seconds to introduce a project I’ve decided to work on (as if I wasn’t busy enough already). As you know, I play WoW fairly regularly (World of Warcraft for those un-educated). There are many resources for the game, and a LOT of addons amongst various sites. Keeping your addons up-to-date unfortunately can be quite the chore, and so some wonderful people over at WoWAce (www.wowace.com), have written a small program to search through their site and find updated addons. Unfortunately, they wrote it in .Net, which obviously doesn’t help us Mac users out there. In comes the Java WoWUpdater: http://sourceforge.net/projects/javawowupdater a small project I’ve taken on, to port the WoWAce Updater to Java allowing it to be truly cross-platform.

I’ll keep you all posted on my progress, but for now there isn’t much to show or tell. If anyone’s interested in helping me out on this project, and knows anything about UI design or Swing, I’d be most appreciative of the help.

Well thats it for now, have fun everyone!

J.