isnoop.net blog

The Drobo storage device is a beautiful piece of technology. It is quite possibly the most user-friendly RAID (like) device on the market. With very little effort, you can have 3TB+ of failure-protected storage at your fingertips.

The problem with the Drobo is that in order to change its true data capacity on the fly and dynamically share it between multiple volumes, it must create “pretend” volumes in even-sized chunks. 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, and 16TB are the options currently available. This means that if you have 1.2 TB of actual space, the Drobo will tell your OS you have two or more TB.

This isn’t usually a problem except when you are running low on space (the Drobo is good to warn you when this happens) or when you are using the Drobo as a Time Machine storage device. Time Machine will continue filling up a drive until it is almost full.

In this post, I will provide you with a simple approach that will allow you to isolate your Time Machine data and give it room to grow in the future.

Preparation
If you have an empty Drobo, I suggest you format it with the largest size you feel comfortable with. Drobospace has a good article explaining the tradeoffs of formatting with a larger partition size.

Open Apple’s Disk Utility and click the drive icon (not its nested partition(s)) for your Drobo.
Next, click the Partition tab and examine your data volumes. You should see one or more named segments in the Volume Scheme section.

Most likely you have just one large volume here named Drobo. If you already have more than one volume, we will work with the largest one.

Making the Time Machine volume
If you already have a dedicated partition for Time Machine, you can skip to the next segment.
You should see a small resize handle in the lower right corner of the DLP. If not, you have journaling disabled. See the note on enabling journaling below and then return here.

Press the plus button below the Volume Scheme display to create a new volume. Name this volume something descriptive like Drobo Time Machine. Make sure to use the format “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.

Next, drag the volume size divider so your new Time Machine partition will have a much space as you can see yourself giving it down the road. I’ll create an 8TB partition and allocate a 4TB volume to Time Machine.

Finally, press the Apply button and let OSX create the new volume. Note that the Drobo may throw some free space warnings during this procedure. This is merely an effect of the OSX partitioning process. This procedure can take a long time depending on how full and how fragmented your Drobo is.

Give Time Machine only what it needs
Now that you have a volume just for Time Machine, you need to shrink it down to just the size you want TM to use for now.

If I have 1.6TB of usable space available on my Drobo, Time Machine will eventually gobble all that up if I leave the new 4TB TM volume as-is. The final step is to shrink that volume down to the right size for now and to expand it only when you are ready.

In Disk Utility, your new volume should have a small resize handle in the lower right corner. Grab that handle and move it up to shrink the volume. I want my Drobo to always have at least 1TB available for usable storage, so would shrink the TM volume down to 600GB.

Press apply and let the Mac resize the partition. Your Time Machine volume is now the perfect size for your backup needs. When you need to enlarge that volume in the future, just go back into Disk Utility and drag the volume handle down to the desired size.

A word on journaling
If the options to resize or split a partition are disabled in Disk Utility, your drive is either not formatted as Mac OS Extended or has journaling disabled. Having the wrong format type will require a volume reformat in order to continue. No journaling is a quick and simple fix:

Open Terminal.app
Run the command “diskutil enableJournal ‘/Volumes/My Drobo’”
Substitute “My Drobo” for the appropriate name.

Once you have completed the volume creation and resizing procedure, you probably won’t need to re-disable journaling. If you have a good reason to turn it back off, run the command “diskutil disableJournal ‘/Volumes/My Drobo’”.

There was a time several months ago when Apple Time Capsule devices required connected Drobos to have journaling disabled, but that problem has long since been fixed. Journaling should be enabled on all Mac OS Extended volumes unless you know what you are doing.

For more information, Apple provides an excellent KB article on the topic.

Summary
I hope this explainer proves useful to you if you find yourself in this situation. Please feel free to share your experience in the comments below.

I’m in the Apple store right now playing with a new MacBook Pro. I love the backlit keyboard of the original MBP, so I decided to get it to light up in this bright showroom for a quick demo.

On the old MBP, you’d cover both speaker grilles at once. There is a light sensor in each one and the brightest of the two is used to determine how much to dim the screen and brighten the keyboard.

Covering the speakers in the new laptop didn’t work, so I tried placing my hands symmetrically all along the sides of the screen. The screen finally dimmed when I slid my fingers across the top bezel above the screen.

Whenever I blocked the camera’s eye with my finger, the screen would dim. This was a troubling revelation. If the MBP is using its camera as an ambient light sensor, that means it is effectively always on and collecting image data even when the recording light is off. This would be a significant departure from the original built-in iSights where Apple claimed the hardware that drives the camera is so tightly linked to the indicator LED that one could not record you without your knowledge.

I busted out my credit card for some fine-tuned testing. I slowly slid it across the top of the bezel and found that it didn’t always dim when I covered the camera. In fact, it only dimmed when the small lighter spot just to the left of the camera was covered. I had assumed that this was the green indicator LED for the camera. A quick trip to Photo Booth confirmed that the LED is in fact on the right side of the camera.

So, rest assured that your new MacBook and MacBook Pro are not constantly recording you as you write emails in bed with your hair in curlers. The placement of the light sensor may cause concern at first, but a bit of investigation quickly indicates that there is little to worry about.

This morning, I completed the final step to activate my iPhone Developer Program membership. The last news I heard about this program indicated that it was (I assume it continues to be) a fairly exclusive program and they are only allowing small numbers of people to join at this time.

I didn’t apply for it until late last week, and I didn’t download the SDK until late in the day it was released, so I’m not sure how I got in so easily. Perhaps they’ve opened the gates to everyone or maybe I just got lucky. I did write a couple of mac apps in the past: MacSaber and WiiSaber. Perhaps they saw those uploads in the Apple Software site and took an interest.

No matter the reason, it’s a bit of a mixed blessing for me. For one, I’ll have to drop my fantastic T-Mobile cellular plan and go legit with my iPhone to run the dev software. I’m currently paying $45/mo for 1500 minutes, unlimited data, and no contract. I’m looking at $79.99/mo for a comparable AT&T plan.

What’s worse, as much as I’d like to, I just don’t have the time to write iPhone apps right now. Heck, I haven’t been able to find enough time to update this blog in months!

Boo hoo, right?

Well, I’ll just have to make the time to write some apps. I have several promising ideas, and I’ll need to sell at least one of them to help justify the increased monthly cost of the new service.

Over the past several weeks, I have gathered nearly 10,000 hits from iPhone users. After sifting through this data, I have found some interesting results:

Only about 28% of my iPhone traffic is from EDGE. Of the EDGE users, 6.2% of them are using T-Mobile.

Here is the breakdown of the top 10 iPhone hosts, cellular providers in bold:

• mycingular.net: 2505
• comcast.net: 1030
• rr.com: 430
• verizon.net: 348
• optonline.net: 338
• cox.net: 255
• bellsouth.net: 243
• shawcable.net: 209
• tmodns.net: 156
• superkabel.de: 151

You might recall an application I wrote earlier this year called MacSaber. If so, my new Cocoa application should be quite familiar.

Hiroaky just released a handy bit of code that adapts the Nintendo Wii’s “WiiMote” wireless controllers for use on the Mac. I have taken his idea and merged it with the magic that made MacSaber to bring you a new breed of audio Lightsaber simulator.

This application looks and works just like MacSaber, but the input device is the WiiMote instead of your Apple laptop. I plan on adding more features including more visual response and multi-controller capabilities soon, so check back again later.

Download WiiSaber 1.0 Beta 1 Here

I work in a large corner office with a beautiful view of Seattle’s Lake Union with frequent breathtaking views of Mount Rainier just to the side of downtown. The hitch is that I share it with three other developers.

On top of the general noise four people make while coding, there is a constant stream of visitors who come to make unceasing mouth noises. Of course, all this stray conversation makes productivity difficult, especially when your job relies heavily on mental focus.

In order to improve my concentration in the face of such adversity, I purchased a pair of AKG K271 circumaural headphones which promised to cut the noise in polyphonic style.

All of their claims are true. These new headphones are like magic genies singing ultraphonic renditions of all of my favorite songs right into my brain all while silencing the crazy world around me.

I typically work with a Windows XP machine as my primary machine and my personal MacBook Pro off to the side as a secondary tool. I had just burned some MP3s to CD on my Mac and was testing them on the PC when I noticed the audio had lost some of its vibrance.

I returned the CD to the Mac to verify and the music did indeed sound much better. Even after turning off EQs and matching volume levels, the audio quality was notably better when comparing the same song back to back.

I suspect that Apple is using some subtle 3D sound enhancements that my poor Dell workstation’s corporate class sound card simply can’t compete with. Many PC sound cards, even generic varieties, come with this feature, but I simply don’t have the hardware to make that comparison.

So, for now, I’ll just have to conclude that music just sounds better with Mac.

It is very uncharacteristic of Apple to have announced the iTV months in advance of release. However, if you’ve been looking in the right places, you might have noticed that you can enjoy your networked HDTV media on your big screen TV today!

Your video options are nearly limitless:
• HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface)
• Component Video
• Coax Digital Audio
• Optical Digital Audio
• Composite Audio and Video
• S-Video

The connectivity is fantastic:
• 802.11g Wireless
• 802.11b Wireless
• Wired LAN: 10/100Mbps Ethernet
• DHCP or Static IP Address
• UPnP AV 1.0
• USB 2.0
• WPA-PSK Encryption
• Hardware-based WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy)
• Up to 128-bit Encryption

As an aside, I’m particularly pleased that they added WPA-PSK into a network appliance.

The idea of putting the power supply inside a device this size was brilliant, but the best part of all is the price: You can buy it now for $199, an entire 33% off of Apple’s iTV suggested retail price!

(click for larger image)

As far as speculations on whether the iTV is going to revolutionize the way home media and electronics are purchased and enjoyed, I am doubtful. The D-Link MediaLounge DSM-520 (see listed specs above) has been available for close to a year now and it has made only a little splash in the media consuming community.

This is a photo from today’s Apple press event.

Your pocket is protected.

MacSaber 1.1 has been released, now with expanded 17″ PowerBook support and keyboard backlight effects. I invite you to take your very expensive laptop into a dark room and swing it around* for improved dramatic effect.

Download MacSaber 1.1.

*Don’t break your laptop, okay? If you do, don’t blame me.

Over the past few weeks, my MacBook Pro has been running slower and hotter with constant harddrive activity. Just this afternoon, iStat Nano measured my CPU at 170ËšFahrenheit, well beyond normal operating range.

I know that claims of hot MacBooks have become quite passe, but my laptop was literally hot enough on the bottom to burn me. At idle, CPU load averaged at around 1.50 and the harddrive was constantly writing according to the activity monitor. I brought this situation to the Apple forums and promptly recieved the answer.

Apparently Apple overlooked several logfiles when they set up the log rotation scripts in /etc/weekly. The texfile /var/log/samba/log.nmbd had topped 100 million lines in a month. The file measured 6.8GB before I removed it.

The Samba logs are two out of a handful of logfiles that are not rotated:

There are several breakdown scenarios which could lead to massive record dumping into some of these files. Unfortunately, there comes a point where adding more lines to a poorly trimmed log file is like throwing water on a grease fire.

If your OSX Mac is exhibiting any of the symptoms mentioned above or you want to ensure optimal health for your system, you will likely benefit from this script.

1) Open the local weekly script file

Note: You will be asked for your system password.

2) Paste the following script in the file

After you’ve pasted this script, press Ctrl+X then press Y.

3) Make the file executable

4) Try out your fancy new log rotation script

You won’t need to manually run this script after this one time, but once you have, you may find your system runs much smoother and cooler.

Thanks to Apple forums member “iggle” for their help in diagnosing this problem.