I was surprised to see this:

Lots!  Hilarious.

I did a quick experiment, and it seems that once you get past 60 attachments in an email, the display shows “lots”.  It seems to occur in Snow Leopard and Leopard, so maybe this has been around for a long time – it is rare to get so many attachments in one email, so I’m not surprised I hadn’t seen this before.

Apple has even internationalised this – so in Japanese, for example, you get:

That’s Apple sweating the details – unlike certain other companies we know.

Not sure why they chose 60 as the cut-off point (or why they had to have a cut-off point). I would have thought they’d have gone for 64, and that was what I was expecting as I added more and more items to a draft email to test. But still, it was funny and brought a smile to my face this morning.

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!

“Faster simpler”? What does that mean? Did they possibly mean “Faster, simpler”? And given the other sentences ended with correct punctuation, shouldn’t that one end with a full stop?

Not to mention the large 7 is a different font than the 7 in the actual logo at the bottom?

It’s just lazy, like everything Microsoft does. Their ads have as much attention to detail as their operating system. No need to click the “Experience now” button – I think that ad tells you exactly what to expect.

Reconnect on Facebook

Logging in to the new look Facebook the other day I was greeted with the following suggestion:

Could it be that I actually talk to my wife in real life? Damn, Facebook is getting to be as crap as Twitter.

Windows 7 copied OS X

A Microsoft exec said they copied OS X. Another exec then said the first has no idea and they didn’t copy OS X – apparently the Windows 7 team lived in a bubble without internet access for the last 8 years and made it all themselves.

I’m going to surprise everyone and say that I think they didn’t copy OS X. If they did, they are shit copiers. Or the photocopier broke down part way through.

Evolution for children

My grand nephew is being brain washed by his grandparents in to Christianity. He’s 7 years old, and being told that God created Adam and Eve. They’ve got him reading a children’s version of the bible at night. Time for me to step up as Great Uncle and self-appointed Scienceparent – I’ve ordered him a book “Our family tree: An evolution story” – something he could also read at night. That’s a first step anyway to give him some balance.

Macs and viruses

I’ve had it with idiots who keep telling me the Mac has viruses too (defending the fact that Windows has a bizzilion viruses and you only have to connect to the internet for like 1 second with Windows 7 and you are infected). The Mac, currently, has no viruses. It has no viruses because no one has worked out how to make a virus for it – not because there are too few users. It is a holy grail for virus writers – the best they have done so far is write trojans for it (which every operating system can have).

Just because you wish the Mac was as virus ridden as the piece of shit operating system you choose to use does not make it a reality. Accept that your choice of computer is crap and live with it.

It is wireless, has no visible buttons (but is in fact a touch sensitive 2 button mouse), has multi-directional scrolling via a touch surface (with acceleration), and support for multi-touch gestures.

WarMouse today announced the availability of a new mouse – the OpenOfficeMouse. Let’s take a look at this beauty.

It is wired, has 18 buttons, a scroll wheel, and a joystick.

I was going to rant about the open source community and how they are even worse than Microsoft at innovation and usability (who would have thought it was possible?), but I think the OpenOfficeMouse does that without me saying anything more. But this monstrosity does remind me of a great cartoon – I recycle this a lot at the office when feature requests start to make the usability of our applications questionable.

Oh, and I apologise for the appalling title of this article. It is late.

This one ad, taking pride of place on Microsoft’s front page, is a showcase for just some of what is wrong with Microsoft.

First, the obvious thing is Microsoft desperately wants to be cool. So desperately. You can smell the desperation.

I can tell you now, using “pretty dope” on your website does not make you cool. In fact, this ad reminds me of some teenager’s father trying to act cool with his teenage son’s friends as they leave to go out partying on a Saturday night:

“Homies…that car is the shizzle! You dudes are dope!!! Where da bitches at tonight? Yo?” (flicks fingers in an attempt to make some cool gang sign he saw on Law and Order).

Mentioning “Twitter” does not make you cool either. You can’t just throw around the latest trends – It makes you look like a try hard.

But there is more. There is always more.

“More reviews”? Was that a review? Well, I guess it was. Just not a particularly good one. A random tweet from a random anonymous user with a one line comment. That’s the quality I’m looking for in a review about an OS that I’m about to drop AU$200 or more on.

But the quality of the copy is nothing compared to the details. Take a look to the right of the ad. We have a number of buttons:

So what’s wrong? Well, first we have different size buttons. This is sloppy when the buttons are all left aligned and not vastly different in text length or position, and even if you argue it is because the text is shorter in some, then you’ll notice inconsistent spacing (between the last letter and the arrow), so that argument doesn’t explain the size variations. And finally, inconsistent capitalisation (“Learn More” versus “Find out more”) – I mean, that is beyond sloppy.

It’s all part of the Microsoft experience – sloppy and inconsistent. Don’t forget this is on the front page of a multi-billion dollar company with an advertising budget of 1.4 billion dollars in 2009 – almost 3 times the budget of Apple in that same year! Compare their ads. Compare their websites!

It’s about sweating the details. It is why Apple’s software is a superior experience to Microsoft’s. It is why the iPhone blows away Windows Mobile. Microsoft still doesn’t get it.

If you are reading this and you still don’t get why those buttons are bad, you see nothing wrong with the ad text, and you can’t smell that desperation, you probably deserve to be using Windows. I can offer you no more.

Do you think Apple create their legendary interfaces based solely on user input? Even Microsoft are smart enough to not do that.

However, I’ve noticed the following Windows 7 ads on the internet:

I give you, the OS built for Homer. :-)

However, my machine at the office is also set up for Wireless Wake on Demand. Those who are interested can read some technical details here and setup details here. This is new in Snow Leopard, and you might recognise that we are talking about waking a machine that is wirelessly connected to a network, not a simple Wake-On-Lan sending a magic packet over ethernet.

So I VPNed to work from home, went to my Finder, selected the menu Go->Connect to Server... and put in “jamie.internal” (my machine’s name on the office network). My machine at work was woken in the background, and I connected to the machine as per normal in the Finder, got the file I wanted, disconnected, and closed down the VPN. My machine at the office went back to sleep and I had the file I wanted.

I could also have shared the screen to manipulate my Mac via its user interface, and apparently even shared iTunes if I had it running.

There is a bit more going on here than just sending a magic packet wirelessly to wake the machine – the Mac is asleep, but our office wireless router is broadcasting over bonjour the services my Mac can actually handle as if it was awake on the network, so that if I try to use these services, it wakes the machine up first. This also means then that my machine in the office, even when sleeping, will still appear on other machines on the internal network as if it was awake, advertising all it’s services. Similarly, if I had it sharing music in iTunes, it would appear as a shared source of music on another machine in iTunes, even when asleep.

This is obviously a very handy feature – possibly more so for my colleagues than for me given I could walk over to the office in 10 minutes from my home to manually get the file (though it is after midnight, and Melbourne streets at night are a little dangerous these days, so I possibly avoided a random stabbing or glassing).

I’m sure you can also see advantages in a system like this for the environment too – machines don’t have to necessarily be running 24 hours a day just so you can access an occasional resource.

This will also work for Macs connected via ethernet. It may also work from a Windows machine to access a Mac at your office (with a SMB share). Not tested, as Windows is not welcome in my home, but I assume it will work.

In the office we have a Mac Pro running Leopard Server. This machine acts as (amongst other things) a file server, providing a common area for sharing files (that are backed up as I’ve discussed previously).

OS X users can access the server using AFP or SMB, and Windows users use SMB. I was whinging to a colleague that Windows keeps leaving these files around that we can see when sharing the drive – those files being:

• Thumbs.db
• ~$* files
• *.tmp files
• Rescued Document* files

He pointed out that that was nothing compared to the sheer number of files Apple’s AFP and OS X leaves behind:

• .DS_Store
• .localized
• .AppleDouble folders
• ._* files
• .TemporaryItems

That’s a whole lot of dot files that OS X users never see because dot files by default are hidden from the user (as they are in any Unix/Linux implementation). However, Windows doesn’t use that convention.

I logged in via Windows and he was right – the file system was a mess. I felt sorry for the Windows users (more than I usually do just because they are Windows users).

So, anyway, to cut a long story short, here’s the fix. On Leopard Server, edit the file /etc/smb.conf from a Terminal window – something like:

sudo vi /etc/smb.conf

Add the following two lines to the [global] section of the file, and save the file:

veto files = /.*/Thumbs.db/
delete veto files = yes

From the Server Admin application, restart SMB.

Now, anyone connected via SMB to the shared file system will no longer see the dot files or the Thumbs.db files.

This doesn’t fix the issue with Microsoft Office leaving ~$* files everywhere, or Windows *.tmp files. You could hide them by adding them to the veto file list, but you probably don’t want to just hide the files as they are quite large. I’m thinking I might write a script that automatically removes these files once they are older than a few days, to try and keep things clean. If you have such a script, then you could hide the other files too.

This week Apple released iWork ’09, which contains Numbers ’09. For completeness I thought I should do the same comparison again, to see how Numbers now stacks up.

The Numbers

Here is a link to the spreadsheet in Numbers ’09 format (zipped), and a PDF Version.

And here is a summary table:

As you can see, things have improved a lot in terms of coverage of Excel functionality. In particular, there are big increases in Statistics and Engineering functions. Almost 100 new functions were added in the new release.

What does that mean for those coming from Excel, or trying to import Excel spreadsheets? Well, Apple seem to have covered most of the common functionality. The numbers above are misleading, and look like Apple haven’t – but when you take, as an example, Engineering functions, you find that most of the missing functionality is around complex numbers. I doubt anyone reading this blog has a spreadsheet that does complex number calculations. Similarly database functions – their use is pretty obscure.

There are possibly some stats and finance functions that will break Excel import, so if you rely heavily on these you should check the list.

So, as I mentioned, that is a big increase in functions. Still, I’m disappointed Apple didn’t try and match Excels functions totally (maybe not Database Functions), and then start to add some of their own. The compatibility argument would have been a lot strong if they had, and some of the functions would have been pretty easy to add (ISNUMBER anyone?)

So is Numbers any good?

Yes. I use it daily, and it is much easier to use than Excel, the results look better, and it has some great functionality such as table categories and intelligent tables – in comparison Excel is just a big boring grid with some functions behind cells.

Being able to put small individual tables on a single page is the real advantage of Numbers, and the end results are spreadsheets that actually look great, communicate better and are easier to manipulate. Numbers is a pleasure to use for the most part.

You can export to Excel format, though it is always disappointing as Excel spreadsheets are so damn ugly. The iPhone also can view Numbers documents (as it can Excel). If you are on Windows of course, you can’t view Numbers documents. But who actually chooses to use Windows these days?!

A few months ago, my work machine (a MacBook Pro) started complaining when iCal was running and kept asking me for my Kerberos password. I’d enter it, and it would respond telling me that Kerberos login had failed. No one else in the office had this issue.

Eventually I compared my ~/Library/Preferences/edu.mit.Kerberos.KerberosLogin.plist with that of a colleague and found they were different. The key difference was that a number of keys had changed type from Boolean to Number. That is, I had:

And they had:

(YAMATO is the name of our server machine).

Changing the types to Boolean fixed the issue.

The question is, how did my machine get into this state? I believe the answer is MobileMe. I had my machine at home and my machine at work syncing through MobileMe, and I included in this sync the syncing of Preferences. I believe the machine at home, that had never connected to Leopard Server, had the “bad” plist, and at some point the plist on the work machine was replaced (or merged) with the home machine.

I’ve turned off Preferences syncing, and continue to use other sync features of MobileMe without issue (for the record, I love MobileMe – it is especially good when you have multiple machines to sync, in my case a number of Macs and an iPhone). This may be a bug with MobileMe, but given how few people use Leopard Server, and of them an even smaller percentage use MobileMe, it isn’t surprising that no one has noticed.

Hopefully if someone is having this issue they will find the solution here.

“Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace”

I was a bit surprised by the comment. Other manufacturers (Dell, HP, Sony) seem to have Blu-ray options on their computers. Apparently it wasn’t so complicated for them (though admittedly easier for Sony).

Fan boys have come to Steve’s defence with comments like “Blu-ray will cost too much – I don’t want to pay extra for a technology I don’t use”. Fair enough – it should be an option. Not that difficult – at one time CD-RW was standard, and DVD-RW was an option at the Apple store. How can you argue against other people who might want the technology actually having access to it, even if you don’t want it yourself?

The reality is that Apple are not being truthful. There are two reasons for the lack of blu-ray on the new laptops.

1. There are no blu-ray slot loading drives that are thin enough to fit in to Apple’s thin laptops.
2. Apple sell HD videos in their iTune store – and they don’t want competition from other sources (i.e. Blu-ray discs bought from the local store or borrowed from the local Blockbuster).

1 needs a manufacturer to help out – which I’m sure they would if Apple asked them to develop the drive. Of course, Blu-ray on the Mac Pro would not have the problem as it can take larger drives. Which leaves only reason 2 for Apple products in general.

And the fan boys pipe up again with “I can get HD videos from the Apple store. Physical media is dead”.

Right. So Apple sell 1080p videos on iTunes? With 7.1 surround sound?

No. No they don’t. They sell at best 720p, and it is compressed to the point that it would fit on a dual layer DVD. That is not full HD. That is not the quality of Blu-ray. Not even close.

If you want to connect your Apple TV, or MacBook, to your Full HD TV, you aren’t getting the full HD experience (Apple TV can’t play 1080p video anyway).

Not to mention that most ISPs around the world limit the amount of data you can download in any month, so hiring a few HD videos from Apple would actually blow the limit on their ISP in days.

But even if you forget wanting to watch movies on your machine, how about wanting to burn Blu-ray movies. The professional video creators using Apple machines want to be able to burn their HD movies to Blu-ray. Where is the solution from Apple? Aren’t Apple supposed to be the leaders in A/V?

The success of the Mac is due to the fact that Apple are the sole supplier of the hardware and operating system – so it all works together so well. The problem with the Mac is that Apple are the sole supplier of the hardware and operating system.

It all works well when Apple are ahead of the game in terms of technology. But when Apple drag their feet, you find yourself quite limited. Blu-ray is a prime example. With other manufactures adding blu-ray drive options, you’re stuck waiting for Apple to do the same. If Apple don’t want to, you can’t go buy a Sony or Dell. Well you can, but all your Mac software won’t run (easily) on it.

There was a time when Apple were the leaders, not the followers. It seems now that Apple have spread themselves too thin on the computer side of their business. When your customers feel they are not cutting edge anymore, they will start to look for alternatives. Apple runs the risk of pissing off their loyal fans and having them move away.

The Q&A sessions showed more of this attitude from Apple. Basically, Apple commented on 3 things they aren’t doing:

1. Blu-ray. “…just a bag of hurt….we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace”
2. Touch screen notebooks. “…it hasn’t made a lot of sense to us”
3. Netbooks. “… a nascent market that’s just getting started”

Probably 2 was a fair enough call – touch screen notebooks haven’t taken the world by storm, though Apple has shown with the iPhone they can do a touchscreen device better than most.

3 is more interesting. Netbooks are really taking off – I’ve known 2 friends to buy one just in the last week or two. One of them has installed OS X on his (it doesn’t all work of course). But it does give some indication that people are sick of waiting for Apple to get off its arse and move on their computer division before everyone packs up and they are left with only their iPods and iPhones.

Lead, follow or get out of the way? Which one is it Apple?

Anyway, Apple this week announced new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. The way I saw it, there were three major complaints:

1. Lack of firewire on the MacBooks.
2. Lack of Blu-ray drives on anything Apple makes, even as an option.
3. Glossy screens only on MacBook Pros – not even a matte screen option.

So much has already been said about 1 that I won’t bother. 2 I might write something about later. But this article is about 3.

Don’t click away just yet. I’m not going to just whinge like everyone else about glossy screens. Sure, I would prefer matte screens over glossy for laptops as I don’t like the reflections. But I don’t think the glossy screens are that bad – I have one on my iMac, and I’ve used an older MacBook with glossy screen and the reflections are generally not terrible.

This post is actually about holding up a mirror (groan) to Apple’s advertising and reflecting (groan again) on how Apple are so skilled at turning a negative in to a positive.

Now, say you wanted to sell a new laptop your company has just created. You want to show how great it is for working, watching videos, playing games. Surely you’d want to also show how clear the screen is – how it won’t distract you from your work and play because it is so bright and easy to read.

Well, that’s what I’d want to show. But maybe that is why I’m not in advertising, because apparently Apple believe the key to selling their new laptops is to show how reflections are so extreme that they get in the way of everything you do.

Case in point, this video from Apple talking about how great their new laptops are.

Let’s look at some images from this video.

We’ll start with a fairly standard marketing shot.

Ok, the reflection on that screen looks quite fake. But we can forgive Apple for this – they are showing that the screen is glossy and bright. We also have this shot:

The reflection is a little extreme here – it looks like a mirror. But the screen isn’t on, so maybe it isn’t so bad. Let’s press on.

Here we have someone actually doing some work. Editing a photo no less.

Yes, when you are editing a photo you’ve taken, you really want to have part of your image looking brighter than the rest due to a big reflection on the screen. It makes working so much easier.

But don’t forget, these machines are great for watching video (as long as it isn’t Blu-ray). Let’s take a look at these machines playing a movie, in this case Iron Man.

Is it just me, or are these reflections getting bigger and bigger now? Has someone at Apple gone mad with the post production addition of reflections to the screen?

Now, I don’t know about you – but if I’m watching a movie, I tend to get a bit angry if I get reflections on my screen. Apparently the Apple guys think this is cool though. The more reflection the better!

So, let’s take a look at how Apple advertise video games on the new glossy screens.

Whoah! Now the reflection is like half the screen. I’m not making this shit up – this is all Apple. And each new image has a larger and brighter reflection.

You’ve got to hand it to Apple advertising though. They can take a negative, play it up to an unrealistic level, and convince you that it is all positive. I’m still struggling with the lack of firewire on MacBooks as a positive. But I’m actually quite thirsty, and Steve is offering me Kool-Aid. Thanks mate.

Now I, and many others, found something grating about this ad. It’s the use of the word “funnest”. Is that even a word? It certainly sounds odd and unpleasant when you say it.

In fact, in typing the word in Apple’s own OS X, the spell checker puts a red line under it to say it isn’t spelt correctly, and suggests replacing it with “funniest”. Not quite the print ad I’d want for my new product.

So, what does OS X’s Dictionary actually say about it? Well, it doesn’t have an entry in search for “funnest”, but under “fun” it mentions it as follows:

Lucky Apple ads aren’t “formal written English”. :-(

Horrible ads Apple. Though not as horrible as Microsoft’s new Seinfeld ads.

However, it is also important that we have offsite backups – in case the building catches fire, or the backup hard drive dies. This is where a rotating set of external hard drives would come in useful.

The Challenge

Time Machine easily backs up to an external USB or Firewire drive. The challenge is that Time Machine can only back up to a single drive. We could eject the drive, then plug in another, but Time Machine is still looking for the first drive so we’d have to manually change Time Machine settings to backup to this second drive. And then when we swap again, we’d have to do this all over again. That is too much work.

The Solution

Here is the solution I came up with. I’ll explain what I did first, then the limitations of this solution.

I started with the following: two 1TB external firewire 800 drives. The drives we bought were the Lacie 1TB Big Disk Extreme +.

I plugged the first drive in to the Mac Pro we are using (running Leopard Server). I changed its volume name to “Backup” and set it up as a Time Machine backup drive. I let Leopard Server do an initial backup.

Next I started the Terminal application, and from the command line looked at the contents of the backup drive, via “ls -a /Volumes/Backup“. The results were as follows:

Your drive will have a different number file name than the .001f5b310098 our drive has.

I copied this .001f5b310098 file to a temporary directory, and plugged in the other 1TB drive. When mounted, I changed its name to Backup, and created a directory structure to match the one on the first drive. I also copied the .001f5b310098 file over to this new drive.

Now I ejected both drives, and plugged in the second. Leopard assumed it was the same drive as the first, and used it for Time Machine backups. I ejected that drive, plugged in the first, and once again, Leopard assumed it was the same drive, and performed a Time Machine backup.

So basically, we now had rotating disks working with Time Machine. I could eject the drive each week, take it off site, and replace it with the other drive, then swap them again the following week.

Hot Swap

The trouble with the system so far is that I need to go to the machine and manually eject the backup drive each week, then plug the other drive in. That means I need to either ssh in, remote desktop in, or go to the machine itself in the server room and have a screen connected to it at all times. This is a server machine – I really want hot swappable drives.

The Lacie drives we bought have a shortcut button – a button you can push and usually (by default) it runs EMC Retrospect. I didn’t want to use EMC Retrospect, but I installed the software anyway as I had an idea. Not quite “hot swappable” drives, but close enough that I don’t need to have a keyboard or screen attached to swap the drives.

I created an AppleScript that the Lacie Shortcut software would run on pressing the shortcut button the drive, and installed it following the instructions that came with the drive (basically there is a system preference to do this once you install the software). The idea of the script is to eject the drive when I push the button, so that I can safely remove it and plug in the next drive in rotation.

But I wanted a bit more. First, I need to know it ejected it without issue, but I don’t want to have a monitor attached. So I made the script talk – telling me if there was an error, or if it ejected the drive without incident.

Second, most of the time the machine has the volume off. So I wanted it to increase the volume for the voice, then go back to the original volume – so we don’t hear beeps etc. when someone logs in remotely to the machine.

Third, if I made a mistake about ejecting the drive, I wanted a push of the button to remount the drive.

So, the following is the script I came up with. You can download the script here.

The result

So now, at the start of each week I can enter the office, go to the server, press the shortcut button, wait for the voice to say “Backup is now ejected”, safely remove the drive, then take the second drive, and plug it in. Leopard assumes it is the same drive, and continues doing incremental backups. The first drive now is taken away and is the offsite backup.

Limitations

There are some limitations to this solution.

First, anything backed up in the previous week will be on the offsite drive. The onsite drive will have a backup from that morning, and from one week ago, but any changes during the previous week are on the other drive. So, if someone needs a file from last week, you have to go and get it off the offsite drive.

For us, this isn’t as big an issue as it sounds. Most of the backups that people need access to are backups of personal files on their own machine, and those backups are stored within a backup store on the server. So they remain on the machine regardless of the backup drive. The “missing week” is only an issue for files that were changed on the server. So far that hasn’t been an issue for us, but depending on the way your company works, it could be a show stopper.

The second limitation is with Time Machine itself. Time Machine doesn’t backup an entire server so you can boot from the backup, or restore an entire system from the backup. If your system is completely hosed, you need to reinstall the operating system, then manually put all your files off the Time Machine backup back on to your server.

Conclusions

It all depends on what you want from your backups. This isn’t the ideal backup, but it is a convenient and easy to set up backup system with rotating disks. It also has great ease of use when it comes to restoring files, given the Time Machine interface. One thing you might like to consider is using some third party software to make an occasional full system backup to another drive that you can use for rebuild if disaster strikes. If you have other ideas, please add them to the comments.

Getting Trac running on OS X Leopard Server is quite simple, though it does require some use of the Terminal application. The following is a tutorial on installing Trac, with an emphasis on doing so in the most OS X way possible, and integrating with Open Directory for authentication (the standard user authentication method used by Leopard Server).

This tutorial is made easier if you follow the instructions here on setting up SVN on Leopard Server. I will in particular make use of the sections on “Using Server Admin” and the section immediately following on “Back to the Terminal”.

Installing Trac

From Safari on your Leopard Server, download the latest version of Trac (at the time of writing, this was version 0.11.1).

If downloaded from Safari, this would normally download the zip file to the Downloads directory, and unzip it automatically. If not, unzip it manually. Then follow these commands:

cd ~/Downloads/Trac-0.11.1
sudo python ./setup.py install

Enter your admin password, and allow Trac to install.

Setting up the Environment

Making folder choices that are OS X-style, create an area for your Trac Environments. The location I choose is /Library/Trac/Environments. From the Terminal type:

sudo mkdir -p /Library/Trac/Environments

The next step is to create an environment for your development project. Because the folder name used here will be part of a URL, and URL components tend to be lowercase, I choose to use a lowercase name for the environment. Suppose we have a project “My Project”. For this project, I create an environment as follows:

sudo trac-admin \
/Library/Trac/Environments/myproject initenv

You will be asked a number of questions. For most you can take the default, but you may want to change the name, and you should enter the correct location for your subversion repository. In the example above, the interaction looks something like the following:

Trac will first ask a few questions about your environment
in order to initialize and prepare the project database.

Please enter the name of your project.
This name will be used in page titles and descriptions.

Project Name [My Project]>

Please specify the connection string for the database to use.
By default, a local SQLite database is created in the environment
directory. It is also possible to use an already existing
PostgreSQL database (check the Trac documentation for the exact
connection string syntax).

Database connection string [sqlite:db/trac.db]>

Please specify the type of version control system,
By default, it will be svn.

If you don’t want to use Trac with version control integration,
choose the default here and don’t specify a repository directory.
in the next question.

Repository type [svn]>

Please specify the absolute path to the version control
repository, or leave it blank to use Trac without a repository.
You can also set the repository location later.

Path to repository [/path/to/repos]>

Creating and Initializing Project

….

Congratulations!

Now, change the owner of the Trac area:

sudo chown -R www:admin /Library/Trac

And set up Trac administration:

sudo trac-admin /Library/Trac/Environments/myproject

This will bring you to a prompt along the lines of:

Welcome to trac-admin 0.11.1
Interactive Trac administration console.
Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Edgewall Software

Type: ‘?’ or ‘help’ for help on commands.

Trac [/Library/Trac/Environments/myproject]>

At this prompt type:

permission add authenticated TRAC_ADMIN

Then type:

quit

Make sure these two commands are applied from with trac-admin, not directly at the Terminal command-line.

Using Server Admin

Start up Server Admin on Leopard Server, and go to the Web section. Click on Sites at the top of the Server Admin screen. In following my SVN setup instructions, you should have a site set up on port 443. We will use this site, so select this site from the list.

Choose the Realms Tab, and create a new Realm for Trac by choosing the + button under the list of Realms (Subversion should already be listed). Enter information as shown.

Once created, the Realms tab should look as follows. Add users to the Realm as required – note that they only need to be listed as having Browse Only permissions.

Go to the Settings at the top of the Web administration page, and choose Modules. Find the “fast_cgi” module and turn this on as shown.

Save all changes.

Back to the Terminal

In Terminal, go to the directory /etc/apache2/sites. If you followed the subversion setup instructions, you will be able to go to the sub-directory “0001_any_443_yamato.internal” (or whatever your directory was called) and add a Trac configuration file.

cd /etc/apache2/sites/0001_any_443_yamato.internal
sudo vi httpd_trac.conf

In this file place the text:

ScriptAlias /trac
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/
Current/share/trac/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi

All on one line. Note that the last two lines should be joined without a space, but there should be a space after “/trac“.

NOTE that Apple have made changes to Python in later releases of Leopard Server. These changes result in the install NOT installing trac.fcgi to the /System/Library area. This makes sense – it was wrong for the installer to have installed in to the /System area, rather than the /Library area. But unfortunately, this breaks things. First, the installer doesn’t install the cgi-bin directory anywhere, and even if you copy it manually to /Library for example, it doesn’t seem to run.

I have found it only runs if it is in the /System/Library area as described in the ScriptAlias line above. So, if you find that your installation doesn’t work following all the instructions in this article, try copying the cgi-bin directory (from your original install) to /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/
Current/share/trac/, making directories as required.

Now set up Fast CGI:

cd /etc/apache2/sites
vi global.conf

In that file place the text:

FastCgiConfig -initial-env
TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR=/Library/Trac/Environments

All on one line.

Back to Server Admin

Restart the web server, by clicking Stop Web and then Start Web.

You should now have a working Trac installation, linked to your project’s subversion repository, and using Open Directory for authentication of users. You should also be able to add and remove people from the Trac Realm at will, without having to mess with the configuration files.

In my example, Trac is available from the web link https://yamato.internal/trac.

Further Configuration

If you want to further configure your Trac environment, you can edit the file /Library/Trac/Environments/cdms/conf/trac.ini and make any changes.

There are a number of resources on the net showing how to setup Subversion on Leopard Server, but just about every tutorial I’ve seen ends up with something that works – but if you make any unrelated changes to your web server with the Server Admin tool at a later date you end up changing your SVN settings and having to redo them.

What I propose below is a general way to avoid this problem that can be applied to Subversion and other tools. I also try and do this in the most OS X way I can, using OS X style folder locations and naming, and the Server Admin tool wherever possible. Further, I show how to integrate with Open Directory for authentication (the standard user authentication method used by Leopard Server).

Creating the repository

The first thing we need is a repository on Leopard Server to store all your files that are under SVN control. In OS X style, I have chosen to store this repository in /Library/Subversion. I will set it up to have multiple repositories – my first is called “projects“. You should change as you see fit. As “projects” will later be accessible via a url, where most url components are lowercase, I chose to name all our repositories in lowercase.

You will need to open Terminal, and type the following. You will need to enter your admin password.

sudo svnadmin create \
/Library/Subversion/Repository/projects
sudo chown -R www:admin /Library/Subversion
sudo chmod -R 770 /Library/Subversion

Using Server Admin

Start up Server Admin on Leopard Server, and go to the Web section. Click on Sites at the top of the Server Admin screen. In my setup, I’ve chosen to have two sites – our intranet on port 80, and our SVN services on port 443 (i.e. we will access SVN using https). Do this by selecting the + button under the list of domains.

Under the General tab, fill in the details for your server. In particular, make sure your domain name is set correctly, and will not change later. In the example below, our machine is called “yamato” and the domain is “yamato.internal” – an internal domain that isn’t used outside of the VPN.

Under the Options tab, select “WebDAV”.

Under the Realms tab, we create a new Realm. This will be used in the future to add new users giving them access to SVN (or not). You create a new Realm by clicking on the + button under the Realms list. Fill in the dialog box that slides out as shown below.

I call my Subversion Realm “Subversion”. Once created, to the right I add the users I want to allow access to SVN, giving them appropriate access (in this case all my users have “Browse and Read/Write WebDAV”).

Under the Security tab, select “Enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)”. I created a new certificate, but you can use the default that Leopard Server creates for you on installation.

Now save your changes.

Click on Settings at the top, and choose the Modules tab. In this tab, find “dav_svn_module” and enable it by ticking the appropriate check box.

Save your changes.

Back to the Terminal

In Terminal, go to the directory /etc/apache2/sites. Here you will find configuration files for your domains. Of particular interest is the domain I have setup for SVN:

0001_any_443_yamato.internal.conf

We want to avoid changing this file as much as possible, only changing it enough to load the changes we need, and changing areas that won’t change if we make further changes to this file via Server Admin. To do this we create a sub-directory called 0001_any_443_yamato.internal.

cd /etc/apache2/sites
sudo mkdir 0001_any_443_yamato.internal

Now, edit 0001_any_443_yamato.internal.conf using your favourite command-line editor.

sudo vi 0001_any_443_yamato.internal.conf

In the file, find the line:

LogLevel warn

Above this line put:

Include “/etc/apache2/sites/0001_any_443_yamato.internal/*.conf”

Replacing the name of the server with the name of your server.

Now, go to the directory you created, and create a new file called httpd_svn.conf.

cd /etc/apache2/sites/0001_any_443_yamato.internal
sudo vi httpd_svn.conf

In this file, type the following

<Location “/svn”>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /Library/Subversion/Repositories
</Location>

and save your changes.

Back to Server Admin

Restart the web server, by clicking Stop Web and then Start Web.

Almost done

Now you just need to add a new project. You’ll need to create the usual SVN directory structure for a project, and import the project with svn import. The URL for the projects repository, in my example, is https://yamato.internal/svn/projects. Authentication will use usernames and passwords of users in your Open Directory.

And that should be it. Now you should be able to add and remove people from the Subversion Realm at will, without having to mess with the configuration files. The general idea of putting extra configuration files in to a subdirectory makes extending Apache much easier while maintaining the use of Server Admin for day to day GUI tasks – I’ll show you how easy that is soon in another blog article on getting Trac up and running on Leopard Server.

Troubleshooting

At a later date we discovered that svn status -u didn’t work – giving an error. We found that we could only get this working by turning off the Forward Proxy we had configured under Web Settings in Server Admin. It is quite possible this could be fixed by adding an appropriate ProxyPass directive in httpd_svn.conf, but haven’t figured that out yet. If you do, please let me know.

The following is a possibly solution to get Spotlight working if you are having this issue¹.

1. Login in to your server as an administrator.
2. Open the Terminal application (in your /Applications/Utilities folder)
3. Type the following exactly as written in to the Terminal:
   

   sudo rm /.metadata_never_index

   It will ask you for your password. You may get a “file not found” error, as the file has only been reported as being there for some users. Regardless, move to step 4.

4. Type the following in to the Terminal:
   

   sudo mdutil -i on /

Spotlight in the right corner of the menu of your server login should indicate it is indexing, and before long will start working.

1. This post is based on a discussion in Apple Discussions, and fixed the problem we had been having with our server.

When it comes to editing these shared contacts, things are a little less straightforward. Leopard comes with an application called “Directory”, that allows you add/delete and edit shared contacts. The trouble is, in doing this, it uses non-standard LDAP attributes (not that there is a “standard” as such, but the ones they use aren’t even used by their own Address Book application). So it is best you just ignore this feature of Directory until Apple fix it – (I’ve logged it with Apple – radar bug report number 5801945).

If you are on a Mac, your best bet is to create your shared contact in Address Book, and then drag the entry to Directory. This works great, except that “notes” are lost. – I’ve logged this as a bug with Apple (radar bug report number 5818049)

If you aren’t on a Mac, or you don’t like the Address Book hack to get around Directory issues, you need another tool to edit the shared contacts. I have found very few tools that could authenticate with a default Open Directory set up – mainly because the client needs to be able to authenticate with SASL, and handle CRAM-MD5 challenge responses.

The one LDAP editor I found that works is Apache Directory Studio.

Once installed, the settings are basically (assuming your Leopard server has domain “yamato.internal“):

Network Parameter
Hostname: yamato.internal
Port: 389
Encryption: [No encryption or SSL]

Authentication
Authentication Method: CRAM-MD5 (SASL)
Bind DN or User: [Your OD username]
Bind Password: [Your OD password]

Browser Options
Base DN: cn=people,dc=yamato,dc=internal

Leave all other entries as defaults.

Once setup, you can connect and browse to entries. You can edit the entries and save them as required.

This means you can, for example, easily edit an existing shared contact. You could even use it as a crude way to enter shared contacts, by creating a template entry, and using that for new entries. Not pretty, but at least will give you correct attributes for LDAP Address Book searches.

There are better LDAP based address books with editing capabilities on the net, but I couldn’t find any that could authenticate with Open Directory beyond the one mentioned here. If you find any, leave me a note in the comments.

Suppose, for example, you are using Thunderbird. For the example, assume your Leopard server has domain name “yamato.internal“. Then you enter the following in the Thunderbird Address Book when creating a new LDAP server entry:

Hostname: yamato.internal
Base DN: cn=people,dc=yamato,dc=internal
Port Number: 389
BindDN: [Leave blank]

This will allow you to search for “people” – i.e. shared contacts entered through Apple’s Directory application in Leopard or some other application. Keep in mind there are huge bugs in the Directory application that ruin this bit – you’ll need to drag people from your local Address Book to Directory to ensure the shared contact works with LDAP search rather than edit them in the Directory application itself, or you may want to enter “people” using some other third party tool (see next blog article I’m writing).

If you want to search on users, change the cn=people to cn=users.

Basically, DirectoryService is crashing on users of Leopard Server. This in itself isn’t a big problem – Leopard Server restarts DirectoryService if it fails. The problem is with AppleFileServer. AppleFileServer seems to lose the ability to authenticate users with the new instance of DirectoryService. This means Time Machine backups stop working, and users can’t mount the server using AFP.

Currently, as of 10.5.2, this has still not been fixed. Apple have apparently given users suggestions such as sending a HUP signal to AppleFileServer at regular intervals to get things back on track, but in my limited testing, this doesn’t work – leaving the user with the ability to only mount certain shares.

The only reliable solution I’ve found is to restart AFP. Obviously we don’t want to do that all the time – it should only be done when DirectoryService crashes. To do this, I’ve built the following launchd daemon. Basically, it works as follows:

The daemon watches the /Library/Logs/Crashes directory, and wait until a crash occurs. When it does, it runs a script that checks to see if the crash was a DirectoryService crash, moves these crash files away in to a sub-directory, and restarts AFP.

Not a great solution, as if someone is connected at the time, they get booted and have to remount. I’m experimenting with other fixes people have listed that don’t require AFP to be restarted, but so far I’ve found they don’t seem to work consistently.

You can download the daemon here.

Once downloaded, uncompress the file (double click in Finder). Safari may unzip it automatically for you.

From a Terminal, cd to the unzipped folder (if downloaded from Safari, by default it will be in ~/Downloads).

cd ~/Downloads/restartafp

Now, type the following. Note that you need to be logged in as an administrator, and you will be asked for the administrator password in order to do the first operation.

sudo mkdir \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/DirectoryService
sudo cp com.curmi.restartafp.plist \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/
sudo cp restartafpondscrash.sh \
/usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod a+x \
/usr/local/bin/restartafpondscrash.sh
sudo launchctl load \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.curmi.restartafp.plist


To test this is working, you can do the following, and check /var/logs/system.log to see if it mentions the restart.

sudo touch \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/DirectoryService_trigger.crash


If for some reason you want to uninstall, run the following commands from the Terminal.

sudo launchctl unload \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.curmi.restartafp.plist
sudo rm \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.curmi.restartafp.plist
sudo rm /usr/local/bin/restartafpondscrash.sh
sudo mv \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/DirectoryService/* \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter
sudo rmdir \
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/DirectoryService


I hope this is useful to others out there. I’ve filed this bug with apple (radar bug report number 5836741), and I hope Apple fixes it soon.

The fix I’m currently trialling was listed here, and suggests that rather than doing:

serveradmin stop afp
serveradmin start afp


in the script, we do:

serveradmin settings afp:authenticationMode = "standard"
serveradmin settings afp:authenticationMode = "standard_and_kerberos"

I’ve tested this and it didn’t seem to work, but I’ll try it again just in case. I’m sure DirectoryService will crash on us sometime tomorrow to confirm if the fix works or not.