It's been three weeks exactly (well, almost), and my new iMac i7 27" went to the repair shop.. (*sniff*).
The iMac booted normally this morning, but after a couple of minutes, the fans started kicking in. A new sensation for me. I have never heard a fan in this, or my other (i)Macs. At first I thought that my external drive (Drobo) started making the noise, but the Drobo was silent.
Turned out the fans in my iMac started blowing (hard), and the airflow was relatively warm. Too warm for a Mac which has been switched on for about 10 minutes with no real CPU intensive tasks running.
First I checked the Activity Monitor and 'Top' in the Terminal app to see if there was some program that consumed too many CPU cycles. Nothing there. On average, the CPU was 3% busy.
Next thing to do was resetting the PRAM/NVRAM by holding the Option-Command-R-P combination during a power-on of the iMac. This also made no difference (booting went a bit faster though).
One can not have enough screen "real-estate" when working with photos, or while exploring your web-development skillz. So, a single display is simply not an option in my case......
Next to my 27" iMac stands a Dell 24" TFT Display. This Dell display is being abused for two things;
- extended display for my iMac, and
- as a main monitor for my (Windows) work laptop
using the input selector on the TFT display.
Since I'm a guy and I rock at multitasking (*cough*), I have both my Windows (work) laptop and my iMac powered on. In this scenario I have only one active display on my iMac. The second display should therefor not be used, and this is where Apple fails miserably.
Today, my very first PayPal spoof/phishing mail arrived. So finally, my e-mail address has been recorded in your average cyberpunk database. Note, that the (Dutch) grammar and spelling in the e-mail is appalling. Just what you expect from a default translation program like Google Translate or Babelfish.
We've been experimenting with with the use of user certificates for VPN access to the lab. Issuing, and using them isn't the problem. The problem is that there's no way of enforcing a password on the use of the private key. You can use private key protection on the certificate template, but that still doesn't enforce a password requirement. The user still has the option to choosing for the notification instead of a password.
Certificate Template - Request Handling OptionsThere's an option to enforce a password, but that's system wide for the Microsoft Cryptographic Service Provider, and we don't want to enforce passwords for ALL certificates. We just want to enforce passwords for this specific template.
Ever since I've been playing with my Mac mini with OS X server 10.6.4 I have had on-and-off problems in the authentication/Open Directory area.
- Some accounts authenticate really quick, while others take minutes to authenticate.
- Accessing the Open Directory through the Workgroup Manager is as slow as a slow boat to China. Changing users (just by selecting them) takes another boat along the Pacific.
So it was time to start digging into the phenomenon called 'Open Directory'.
The manual from Apple isn't much help in troubleshooting a slow Open Directory, so it was time to search the interwebs and start experimenting. If it didn't work, I can always reinstall the entire server from scratch.
It has finally been done. I've switched off the old Windows 2003 server at home and officially replaced it with an Apple Mac mini server. For now... And with 'for now' I really mean for now. It turns out that Apple OS X Server doesn't resemble its client counterpart at all. Where the client is stable and intuitive, the server edition lacks both.
I'll try to explain why I think there's lots of room for improvement. Mainly stuff I ran into while configuring the server/services.
Since the Windows fulfilled several functions, I needed these functions to be available on the OS X server as well. These were;
- Networking services like DNS and DHCP
- Webserver
- Mailserver
- MySQL Database
- SSH Server
- File sharing on the internal network
- Public Key Infrastructure for issuing certificates
- Download station
Evaluating these functions, one would think that this shouldn't be a problem. Well it actually is.... At least some of those features.
;)