Missing Link

What do you do when you’re finished with a document on your computer and need or want to get rid of it?   For most people the answer is to delete the file.  That is, after all, the most logical thing to do, right?   What a lot of people fail to realize is that simply deleting a file does NOT remove it from your hard drive.  A person skilled in data recovery can easily recover that data unless it has been overwritten several times.  Deleting the file only removes references to the file from the filesystem.  It does not physically remove the data from the drive, however, instead it just allows the computer to overwrite the space where it had been stored.

There are, however, ways you can securely delete files from your computer.  These tools will overwrite the space on the hard drive where the file resided,  usually 7 or more times (and often the number of passes is configurable).  This morning my boss brought to my attention the fact that one such utility is available by default on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).   The command, srm, is used via the command line and will securely remove your files.

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Back when I got my first mac,  a 12″ Powerbook G4,  one of the guys I worked with suggested that I get Applecare with it in case anything went bad.  I thought it was a bit pricey, but opted to heed the advice.   I’m glad I did, though, as two years after I got the powerbook – my hard drive died.  A call to Applecare and a week later, my laptop was back with a new hard drive (and has been running just fine ever since – still runs to this day.)    Now – a lot of people will say that the cost of a hard drive is much lower than the cost of applecare, and you’d be right.   In my case, though, it did end up paying for itself – though not the way most people would expect (or want).    A very long story short – I tripped over my power cord and caused my powerbook to fly off my lofted bed and crash to the floor, bending the case and causing some problems.   I sent it off for repair to be told it would cost me $700 because of accidental damage.   I tried – unsuccessfully – to cancel the repair and have it shipped back,  only to have them repair it anyways.   Since I had tried to cancel they never charged me for the repair – so I got $700+ in repairs for free.

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It should come as no surprise to anybody that I am an Apple fan. I use Mac’s almost exclusively (I do have a Windows 7 / Ubuntu Linux dual boot workstation in my home office…. along with a 24″ iMac ) and am sometimes very outspoken about the benefits of using Apple hardware and devices.

The reason for that is simple: for MOST things, and MOST people, Apple’s products just work.  And, when it doesn’t just work, it’s usually fairly easy to GET it to work.  It’s NOT perfect, and I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it can be downright annoying when it doesn’t work. Overall, though, I find myself a whole lot less frustrated with Apple computers than I do PCs.

Apple just released late last week their latest upgrade to their venerable OS X lineup – OS X 10.6: Snow Leopard.  Many of the most important changes to the OS are under the hood and not easily seen by the average user, but will most definitely add significant performance improvements moving forward. There were a couple of things that were changed that had me excited – the most important of them being native support for Microsoft Exchange.

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My last two posts covered how I implemented portable home directories on my home network using OS X Server (Leopard) with Open Directory. It seemed to be working fine for all I wanted to use it for – until I checked into things more and found it had stopped syncing with the server on the 8th. Now, it would go through and ACT like it was syncing, and even would report that it had synced successfully. The sole indicator that things were not as they seemed was that the timestamp for the last sync never updated. I decided to look into things in the logs to see if I could see any errors. Sure enough, I could. Using Console, I checked out FileSyncAgent-verbose.log, and saw something along the lines of :

0:: [2008/01/13 17:33:02.224] -[SSyncEngine(private) _generateSyncJobs]: failed with exception “-[SSyncEngine(private) _generatePackageSubjobsWithWinner:loserStates:] (SyncEngine.m:1206): “‘((state.isAddJob))’”"

Obviously there was an error, but the messages in the logs were very much less than helpful. They were downright cryptic! After many hours putzing around trying to find a clue on the ‘Net as to what MIGHT be causing it, I noticed a directory in my home directory on my local machine called .FileSync. I remembered a while back a solution to a weird problem I had (completely unrelated) with shutting down my computer, it was to remove a directory and let it be re-created. So, since nothing ELSE was working for me, I decided to try removing that directory ( i made a backup copy of it first). As soon as I initiated a manual sync after removing that directory it fired through, found a ton of conflicts ( I told it to keep the versions found on my local machine over those on the server), and then it started syncing just fine. I’m still not entirely sure WHAT caused the problem in the first place, one day it was working the next it wasn’t. It could have been something I inadvertently did wrong (and I suspect I botched a conflict resolution somewhere along the line and caused problems) or it could just be the manifestation of a bug. Who knows. At least I know a trick to try should something like this happen again.

I’ve not had much time to post on the conclusion to my project I undertook last night.    The short synopsis is that it was a success.    The long synopsis is… well, the rest of this post.

Really the rest of it was pretty easy.   After Leopard finished installing I created an account and did all the normal things you would need to do.   Once I was logged in I went to the Directory Utility to bind to my Open Directory server.  It’s really easy to do that,   just open directory utility (it’s in the utilities folder in your applications directory), and click the + at the bottom left of the screen.    It defaults to open directory so all you should need to do is put the server info here, either as a fqdn or ip address.   Once you’ve filled that out and submitted it,  your machine will try connecting to the server and checking that it’s all OK.  This is pretty fast,   and when done should display the server in the server list and say that it’s communicating properly.   Once you’ve completed that you can move on to the next step – logging in and setting up the mobile home directory.

It’s pretty easy – and most of it takes place on the server itself.   In workgroup manager.   Select the user you want to set this up for (there may be a way to do this globally, but I didn’t bother trying to figure out how),  then select preferences.   The one you are looking for is Mobility,   and you can set it up to your liking, but you want to create a mobile account and allow for mobile home directories.

Once all that was all set up (actually I already had that set up before i started the project)  all I needed to do was log in on the MBP.   When I logged in it asked me if I wanted to create a mobile account on the machine, with the mobile home directory.  I said yes, and it immediately started syncing the home directory on the macbook with the one I had created on the server.   I left it to do that, knowing it would be at least an hour before it was finished (as a note, you should be connected to ethernet when doing this, preferably on gigabit if you can manage that – there is a LOT of data to move here).   About an hour later the sync had finished and I was logged in.  Everything seemed to be working just fine.   I fired up iTunes to be sure my music library made the transition and was pleasantly surprised to find that it had.   I did have to authorize it to play purchased music on the computer (due to the reinstall of leopard), but that was expected.

I downloaded the apps I use regularly (adium,  visualhub, twitterific, etc) and was happy to note that once installed they picked up their preferences and settings as they had been before – that much less I had to do since I didn’t need to set up my apps how I like them.

I’ve not yet tried iPhoto,    I’m waiting on my iLife ‘08 install media to arrive ( should be here tomorrow morning) so I can install it.     I’m confident, though, that it made it alright.  The only real hiccup I could see happening there is permissions, but that was taken care of by Sync, which set the permissions on the server during the sync process.  Very nice.

Overall – Mission Successful.
The general rundown of the process I took is thus:

1. create account on the open directory server and set up mobility settings , etc.
2. create admin account on my macbook pro
3. log in to admin account on macbook pro,  download and install synk
4. connect to the open directory server so I can access my users home directory, log in as the user account created in step 1
5. Using Synk , and running it as root,   selected the home directory I wanted to move to the server as the source,   and selected the home directory on the server as the destination.    run synk.
6. Once Synk has finished,  do a fresh install of Leopard on the macbook pro
7. Once the install is finished, bind to the open directory server.
8. Log into the macbook pro as the user created in step 1, and when prompted select to create the mobile account.
9. profit!

The process, while a little nerve wracking,  was actually pretty easy to do.    I owe my friend a big thanks for his thoughts and suggestions on a method to try,    it worked out well!

As always,  if you try this on your own don’t hold me responsible if things don’t work for you – be sure you have a backup (preferably a FULL backup) of your mac before you try this, if something fails you’re going to wish you had it.   I will try to provide hints or suggestions if you find yourself stuck, but don’t expect miracles

Enjoy

[tags] Apple, Open Directory,  OS X Leopard Server,  OS X Server, Leopard Server, Portable Home Directory, Mobile Home Directory [ /tags]