The problem :

The problem is famous : how to keep multiple computers in sync in order to have access to our data no matter where we are, no matter which computer we are using. It isn’t the first time I wonder about how to improve this aspect of my computer setup and I must say that Dropbox, Evernote, Google Calendar, GMail and a lot of other “cloud” solutions as they are called have helped tremendously over the years. Still, this week iMac incident once again brought the problem to the surface.

A little background :

My primary computer is an iMac based at home. I work as a software engineer so I also have a work computer. At the moment, this is a brand new MacBookPro. I also own a three year old MacBook which I use when we are away from home (unload photos, check emails, simple things like that).

When my iMac broke down earlier this week, I wasn’t without a computer. I had two more. Still, I felt left out because my various emails accounts were not setup on either MacBooks (my work computer doesn’t carry any of my personal data), my iCal wasn’t setup on any of these machines to track my appointments. My on-going projects on the iMac (personal development, Lightroom work, etc) was also stuck on the iMac’s hard drive.

A possible solution, making my Mac User portable :

The problem is known and a lot of people have solved it many different ways.

Apple tries to answer it with MobileMe, Microsoft created LiveMesh, etc. The problem is different for each of us as we all have a different setup. Some might decide to simply sync (using rsync for example) two computers to be exact replicas of each others. With today’s bandwidth, this is a solution just as valid as any other.Of course, the problem also depends on your setup : do you have several personal computers ? Do they all run the same OS ? Are they on the same network, etc ?

My situation has the following characteristics

• I am the only person using these three computers (boyfriend is allergic to Mac somehow, he might launch Opera to check his emails on the MacBook when we’re away from home but that is an effort for him)
• All three machines are running Mac OS X Snow Leopard
• I usually do not use two of these computers at the same time. I work on the MacBook Pro in the daytime, turn it down in the evening and use iMac for personal stuff. If we’re going away, I’ll update the MacBook (load music and stuff on it) and pack it while I’ll switch off the iMac.

Because of my situation, it seems to me that I can carry my Mac User around without taking too much risks in terms of file conflicts.

Testing

While I had my iMac repaired, I went and shopped for a 1TB 2.5 external hard drive. I ended up with a Western Digital Element SE (80 euros).

Here’s the idea :

Using Carbon Copy Cloner, I will periodically sync my iMac’s Home Folder on the Western Digital Element. That simply means that my main Mac user will be available on this external drive with all my personal data (Music, Photos) and profile (Mail.app configuration, iCal configuration, etc).

On the MacBookPro, I renamed my user from samo (which I had used across all computers) to samowork. Then, I created another user called samo whose Home Folder is the Western Digital Element. I logged in with that user, fired Mail. It works, all my personal emails were there and the work emails were left out. So, from now on, if my iMac gets sick again, I can use another computer as a temporary replacement. Better yet, that will not leave any trace on that other computer (it’s all kept on the external drive).

On the MacBook, same procedure. I renamed my user to samobook and created another samo user whose Home Folder is the Western Digital. Now, when we are on the move, I don’t only have a Mac with me (which is cool) but I have MY Mac with all my stuff and that’s WAY COOL.

Also, the Western Digital Element also acts as an extra backup of my personal data (in addition to the Time Machine backup I make weekly)

I just completed this setup (doing a manual copy for now, not a CCC backup) of my Home folder and didn’t encounter a problem yet.

What’s left to do ?

• Automating the sync (with CCC) or rsync and a cron
• Making sure that, when running my profile on a different computer, I can sync my iPhone and not loose my media or apps (see also my article about having 1 phone and multiple macs)

Going all the way ?

I suppose, to go all the way, I should use the Western Digital drive as my Home Folder on the iMac as well. No need to sync anymore but that would mean always having that drive hooked up and not using it as a backup anymore. Also, if there is ever a conflict somewhere, I’d rather just be able to consider the iMac the master Home folder and the rest as a slave. For now, I’ll experiment that way.

What you need to know :

• If you wish to use your main account on the other computers (in my case, on the laptops), I would recommend pluging the external drive BEFORE logging in your account. I do not know what would happen if I was to login and my Home Folder wasn’t found.
• You SHOULD only use your main account on what computer at a time. If I am using my account on a MacBook, I’d better sync the WD back with the iMac before using my iMac (to avoid conflicts between files)
• Changing account’s shortnames and home folder is possible (and seems to be very well handled by OS X). Still there are dangerous operations. Check out the following pages of the Apple support site before proceeding
  How to change the shortname or home folder name
  How to move the home folder
• This setup doesn’t not synchronize the installed Applications. Now I can see my photos on the work MacBookPro but I would need to install my Lightroom there to work on them (which I probably won’t do) but I could easily edit a personal project on my work computer since Textmate is installed across all my machines (and setup exactly the same way every where thanks to DropBox)

Anyway, I thought the idea was worth sharing as it might really answer the problem for me for now (still wondering how MobileMe will evolve).

Procedure :

Source machine :

Here is how to setup the backup from the imac’s home folder to the WD external drive using CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner)

1. Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner, launch the software
2. On the left, select your Macintosh HD and browse to Users > <yourUser> (ie samo)
   
3. On the right, select your external hard drive (I formatted the volume and named it samo)
4. Click on Save Task button
5. In the following screen, name your task and schedule it
   
6. To run and test it immediately, press Run
   
7. This will take a while…
8. Check the content of your external hard drive, you should find all the files you have in your Home Folder
9. Note that, next time, the backup will take a lot less time as only modified/added files will be transfered (CCC uses rsync which backups incrementally)

Some my prefer to use rsync manually and be more in control of their backup.

Here’s a working code sample to get your started :

Sync the whole samo Home Folder (dry-run mode + verbose move, will only list what rsync would have done)

Actually launch the command

Delete the files that are on the external HD if there aren’t on the source computer anymore

Do not delete the files on the external HD, do not touch the ones that were modified on the external HD

A lot more options and information about using rsync can be found in posts such as 15 rsync command examples.

Target machines :

Here is the procedure I followed on the two laptops to move my current user “samo” and create the main one (with its exterrnal data).

1. Go to System Preferences and go to the Accounts section
2. Create a new administrator user (ie login admin, password admin). We will delete it when we’re done, it’s just a user I create in case something goes wrong I can always log back with him as Administrator and solve the problem
3. OPTIONAL: if you already have an user on this computer named like your main user, you need to edit its name and Home Folder name…
   Launch Terminal.
   Navigate to /Users (cd /Users)
   Rename your user’s Home Folder (ie mv samo samobook)
   Back in the Accounts management, click on the lock to allow changes (if necessary)
   Right click on your user’s name in the list on the left and enter the Advanced Options
   Change your user’s shortname (ie from samo to samobook)
   Change your user’s home directory (ie from /Users/samo to /Users/samobook)
   Restart or Logout and Log back in to make sure your user still works…
4. Return to the System Preferences > Accounts section and create yet a new user. Enter the account name of your main user (ie samo)
5. Right click this new user in the list on the left, edit the home directory and select the Home Folder you copied on an external drive
6. At this point, you can delete the temporary admin user (created at step 2), then logout and back in as your main user to see if everything worked for you

Last but not Least

Once your Mac user is following you everywhere, you can sync your iPhone/iPad (including the media ie apps, music, etc) from any of your computers without loosing data on your device.
Note: you still need to authorize each of the computers you use for purchased items so this trick won’t enable you to bypass the 5 computer limitation.

I hope this setup will work for me and hopefully help other multi-mac users out there…

I quickly identified two things :

1. hangs would occur when launching apps or triggering the launcher (spotlight, Alfred) which meant “hard drive access”
2. with the help of the Activity Monitor I could tell that the hangings were echoed by flatlines on the hard disk activity.

My hard disk was going out with all my data. Or maybe my whole computer was dying (of course, warranty had expired 3 months ago).

Next actions :

1. insert my time capsule drive in the USB dock and made sure I would have a current backup
2. managed (see below) to talk to a Genius from the Apple Store and had my diagnose confirmed : the hard disk was probably causing the problem

Side note : the Apple Store Geniuses are not to answer the phone. How did I get to talk to one ? My mother was shopping that day and spotted an Apple Store. That is one of the things that makes her think of me and call. She called saying “I’m at the Apple Store, did you need anything?” She implied something about the iPad2 my whole family knows I’d like to get but I just said “Yeah, fix my iMac”… Then I asked her to see if she could find a “Genius”. It was a week day, 11am. They were not too busy and one reluctantly agreed to take my mother’s iPhone and talk to me. He wouldn’t really garanty anything over the phone but he felt, like me, the hard drive was to be checked. He asked me to bring the computer to the Store. Little did he know I live 1000km away from my parents and am unlikely to bring my iMac to his store.

Now this was turning into a geek’s nightmare. My iMac was going out fast. The hangs got more frequent and lasted longer. Mail.app would crash more than anything else. No more emails, no more calendars, no more address book (well, on the iPhone right?) I could have changed the HD right away but somehow, I suddenly realized I didn’t even know how to open the iMac… A quick glance around youTube taught me that opening the iMac requires suction cups (whatever that may be) and looks like a pretty dangerous (for the iMac) operation.

I have built PC before but somehow, I didn’t feel like driving to the hardware store, ask for the French translation of suction cups and open the beast. I went back to my work (on the work MacBookPro) and left it at that.

Next steps (two days later). I took an apointment with the Apple Store Genius for the week end but still wanted to make sure the drive was at fault. I ran Disk Utility. It found errors. So I inserted the Snow Leopard Disk, pressed ‘C’ during bootup and launched the Disk Utility from there. I repaired the disk and that went well. Rebooted, the problem remained.

Another attempt, the Apple Hardware Check accessible by booting with the OS CD in and pressing ‘D’ during bootup. It found no errors.

Now, a quick Google search taught me that : replacing the drive at the Apple Store would cost 200 euros and take a week. That is another FULL WEEK without emails, calendars, todo list, music collection, lightroom, you know… no computer

So, at this point, I cancelled the appointment with the Genius and went another route.The week end came and I took the iMac to a unofficial Apple Genius who claimed he knew how to change the drive and open the machine. I picked a 2TB 7200 rpm drive to replace the original 1Tb Seagate. This is where it’s going to get fun later : the hard drive model has changed…

Repair went well, I reinstalled Snow Leopard, it worked good, no hanging. TimeMachine backups are absolutely awesome. In 4 hours, I had all my data back, all my settings, all my applications reinstalled. TimeMachine has to be the thing PC lacks the most.

BUT, after a few minutes of “normal” use, a problem surfaced. The iMac was now noisy (another thing Macs do better than my home built PCs is running quietly). The fan was going nuts in there for no apparent reason. I installed the iStats widget on the dashboard (highly recommended) and realized that, even though the HDD temperature was read at 40 C, the HDD fan was spinning at 5400rpm. Insane !

Reading here and there, I realized this was due to the hard drive change. Either the temperature sensor has been messed with or damaged or, simply, the new hard drive is incompatible and the fan just doesn’t know what to do so it just spins at max speed. The first thing to do in that case is to reset the SMC. That didn’t do it for me though. I read about several fan control apps (most notably smcFanControl which seems to be famous) but none allowed to reduce the fan speed, they could only set the minimal fan speed or increase it. Finally, I found HDD Fan Control by Ben Surtees. Installed it and instantly, the HDD fan went back down to 1600 rpm and the iMac was silent again. What a relief!

What a week, I’m glad to have the iMac back. Many many thanks to TimeMachine and Ben Surtees for saving the week end.

Oh by the way, if you didn’t do it already, take a minute in this three day week end to setup your time machine backup. Hardware doesn’t last forever.

Anyway, just as a reminder, here are the commands to edit these settings :

Change the language with

Change the default keyboard layout

That’s it, much more comfortable…

Here are the steps (OS X)

• download and install the latest version of Virtual Box
• download and install the latest version of qemu
• Run the following commands in your terminal (assuming that your vmware appliance is called vmwareapp.vmdk)

Run Virtual Box, in the disk management section, add the existing disk and select the virtualboxapp.vdi file. Then, create a new machine, and make it use this drive you just created.

Finally, boot the virtual machine…

My appliance was CentOS based and, at startup, I was getting a nasty kernel panic. After trying a lot of solutions provided on Google, I realized the kernel panic was simply caused by my VM settings. In Virtual Box, I edited the settings so that the virtual hard drive appeared to be mounted as Primary IDE and not as a SATA drive… That fixed it for me, so if you are facing a kernel panic in Virtual Box, check this out.

I will not go into the details of why Apple implemented the Finder with the use of these files (or whether this was a bad idea) but I will simply list some solutions I found around the Net to fix the “problem”.

The free and incomplete solution

It is possible to prevent OS X from writing these files on network drives (SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS and WebDav to be exact). If this is the only way you and Linux/Windows users share access to the same data, this might be good enough for you.Note that it will not prevent OS X from writing these files on USB mounted drives if oyu happen to share data that way as well.

1. Open Terminal.
2. Execute the command

   1	defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

3. Either restart the computer or log out and back in to the user account.

Source: Apple Support

There is also a software way to acheive the same goal for those who do not wish to use Terminal or might be curious as to what other options are hiding in their OS

Tinker Tool is a software that lets you tweak the guts of OS X including the option to write or not write the DS_Store files to your network drives.

Of course, by deciding to not use these files you will loose the features they are responsible of like the saving of your window position, custom view, etc.

Now, if you chose this path, these files will not be created on your network drives anymore though you might still need to remove the existing one.

Still using the terminal, you can do so by running the following command :

The rich and complete solution

Another software, called Blue Harvest, enables you to decide whether these .DS_Store files should be written on network drives or USB mounted drives and will also handle the cleaning of these files in drives where they have already been written. There is a 30 days trial available so you can check this solution out and decide if this is worth it to you.

Sources:

• Prevent .DS_Store and Trash creation on USB Drives
• Say Goodbye to .DS_Store files

Well, unfortunately, we just found out that OS X is not 100% awesome, but we can still make it look like it is to our “Windows users friends”.

Creating the droplet

A Finder droplet is really an AppleScript which interacts with the Finder in order to obtain either the path to the current directory or the selected file and with another app in order to launch it or interact with it. This AppleScript is then saved as an application which we will add to the Finder menu by a simple drag and drop.

My droplet is simple : it will get the path to the directory opened in the current Finder window. Launch iterm if itsn’t already running and cd into that directory.

So, here is the code behind my droplet :

Customizing the droplet

At this point, you can save your code as an application from the AppleScriptEditor and drag the resulting file to the Finder toolbar. Click it, and the current folder is opened in iTerm.

Still, before adding this to my Finder’s toolbar, I customized it with a little terminal icon. Mac OS really make this simple. Simply find an icon you like and open it using Preview. Copy the image to clipboard (CTRL-C). Then, select the Application you just created with AppleScriptEditor and right click to display the file info (or use CTRL-I). Select the icon at the top left of the window (it will be selected in blue) and paste your image (CTRL-V).

That’s it. This step was surprisingly simple.

Installing the droplet

Nothing complicated in this step : simply drag your application (or droplet) to the Finder’s toolbar. Click it, iTerm will open and your pwd will be set to the current Finder’s window directory. Handy.

Download

If you simply want to download my version of the droplet to not go through these steps yourself, click here. If you would like to use more droplets. start your hunt right here.

Googling iTerm lead me to a few more improvements…

iTerm2

First, iTerm2 is a fork of iTerm hosted on Google Code which has been a lot more active lately than the original iTerm. I downloaded it and replaced the iTerm1 with this new one.

Good news, while all my profiles and bookmarks were conserved, the profile and bookmarks management was greatly simplified. I recommend you to upgrade, too.

Growl

iTerm and iTerm2 both support Growl notifications. That means you can display a message in Growl from your scripts with the follwing command :

Since this is a hard command to remember, Damon Parker suggested adding the following line to your .bashrc or your .bash_profile

So, if your starting a command that will run for a while and want to be notified when it’s completed, you can do

Visor

One of the features introduced by the iTerm2 team is the “Visor”. Visor is an existing tool for Terminal allowing you, with a simple hotkey, to make the terminal appear on top of any running app.

To use this feature with iTerm2, no need to install anything extra. Simply edit your preference and choose a Visor hotkey.

A nice little addition to the iTerm I was used to.

Dashboard widget

There is a Dashboard Widget for iTerm allowing you to run quick commands from the Mac OS X Dashboard.

Last but not least, the launch script

AppleScript was already compatible with iTerm and this feature was conserved in iTerm2 so that I can automate the creation of my iTerm workspace.

Below is an example of the type of things I do when launching my iTerm workspace like opening a tab in a given folder and running svn up. Emptying a log file and tailing it. Launching memcache in a dedicated tab. Opening a bookmarked session on a remote server, etc.

Below is an example of a working AppleScript.

Finally, to use the script, you must :

• either save it as an application in the Apple Script Editor (File > Save as) which you’ll be able to run from Spotlight, Albert, Quicksilver or any launcher you are using
• save the scripts as ~/Library/Application Support/iTerm/AutoLaunch.scpt in which case the script will run when you launch iTerm - everytime
  

Split Panes

Another good news is that iTerm2 introduced split panes. I’ve just tweeted the developer hoping to learn how to script the creation of split panes. Stay tuned…

Update :

Another iTerm2 user suggested the following Apple Script to create split plane (until the developer gets back to us with official support). You can see his contribution on Google Code.

Anyway, this is a welcomed feature!

And a few more tricks…

• a script creating a “term” command by Damon Parker. The command allows you to open a new session with arguments such as current directory or a command to run. Pretty handy!
• open iTerm with the current Finder window pwd as current directory with this Apple Script by Simon Dorfman
• several scripts and commands to interact betweem iTerm and the Finder as well as between TextMate and iTerm by xanana

• go to /usr/local/zend/lib/php_extensions and backup your memcache.so file in memcache.so.bak
• go to /tmp and extract libmemcached which you can download from the libmemcached website
• go to the extracted directory named libmemcached-0.44 and install the library

• now, still being in /tmp, using pecl and phpize, download and install memcache

• Enable the extension in your php.ini by uncommenting the line extension=memcache.so
• Restart Apache

• Go to a phpinfo page to make sure the extension memcache was installed

This should work for most extensions available in the PECL library.

External Links

• Some notes on Zend Server CE for Mac OS X
• Installing memcached PHP extension on OS X Snow Leopard
• Compiling PHP extensions with Zend Server

If you don’t already have it, download and install Virtual Box. Launch it

You start by creating a New Virtual Machine by clicking New. That will launch the wizard shown below:

Click Next

Mint isn’t an option so I just picked Linux 2.6 here

I set the memory to 512Mb but that can be changed later in the settings

Select the creation of a new hard disk

That will prompt a new wizard for the hard disk creation. I named it, picked a location and set the size to 8Gb. That’s it, the virtual machine is created.

Now, back to the main menu (the first picture, way on top), this time, click on Settings.The trick to boot from the .iso file is to go to Storage, select the CDRom and mount the iso file…

Now, back to the main menu. Click Start to launch the virtual machine. It will boot from the iso file and launch Mint as a live distrib. From the desktop, you can click no the install Mint shortcut and follow the usual Linux installation steps (it’s pretty straightforward with Mint). Turn off the machine when asked to. Go back to the settings and unmount the iso file. Restart the machine. Welcome to Mint!

Here is a working example of an FTP upload within a bash script:

Extra tip: if you need to download more than one file, use mget instead of get. The same works for mput instead of put.