el capitan?

[Mike Andrews]

James Sentman <james at sentman.com>
Apr 15 (1 day ago)

> I LOVE SSD drives :) put one in my server recently and also in my wifes
> laptop, it was like getting a whole new machine for $200. I did my install
> in the opposite order though. While the machine still had it’s original
> drive in it I connected the SSD via a cheap USB adaptor and rebooted the
> disk into recovery mode. Installed the current OS fresh on the SSD. Then
> swapped it out, booted from it, ran the upgrade to El Capitan and all was
> fine. I wanted to start from scratch with this update so I did a clean
> install and did not copy over any of my data or apps until I had it all
> working.
> If you wanted to just replace your existing drive I would recommend again
> connecting the SSD with an external interface of some kind (these are not
> expensive and are very handy to have around) and use carbon copy cloner or
> that other imaging tool who’s name I forget to make a bootable clone of
> your internal drive to the external. Then swap them.



I have a good collection of USB and Firewire SATA drive interfaces.  In
this case, I had the original hard drive connected by USB. That was what I
booted from when El Capitan install worked.

A couple of the previous install fails were due to not having the Mac
plugged in to the net so I could get the OK from the Apple mothership.  Of
course, the error message was just "Unable to install on this Mac" with no
hint as to why.

The good thing is I have the sucker humming along fine and ready for
> XTension.  I even got Time Machine working to backup across the network to
> Mountain Lion Server on the old Xtension server.
> I am having some minor problems with time machine on El Capitan server.
> Problems I didn’t have with 10.9 server which was the one I upgraded to El
> Capitan from. The change to SMB for file sharing seems to have done
> something. Time Machine connections are still done over AFP, so the sharing
> system has to support both. Over time my file sharing speed to the machine
> drops off until it takes me 10 minutes to copy a new beta of XTension to
> the server for testing instead of the 30 seconds it should take. I did a
> lot of physical network debugging and found no problems until I restarted
> the server and the speed went back to normal. Looking at the file sharing
> control panel I see 14 AFP connections from my wifes laptop, all of them
> idle. 14 connections?! any AFP sharing has to be form time machine so what
> the heck is her machine doing? She doesn’t leave it open very long at any
> one time, using it for a bit and putting it to sleep, perhaps those
> connections don’t drop properly I don’t know, I have manually disconnected
> those connections but I can’t tell if that did the same good for the file
> sharing speed as restarting did. The activity monitor says that the apple
> file sharing server has 204 threads right now. My brain shuts down at the
> idea of 200+ threads running inside one application space. No wonder it
> hangs up! So keep an eye on that if you update to El Capitan. None of the
> other machines in the house cause that kind of hangup, just Becka’s so
> there’s something special about her ;) I will figure it out, it’s not a
> show stopper and probably won’t bite you but it’s something that has been
> frustrating me lately, and honestly I don’t need any more frustrating right
> now with all the construction going on around here ;)



THANKS, James, THAT is a good reason to keep the other server on Mountain
Lion until I hear better news.

I have yet to move Xtension over, but I will shortly.  I'll see if I have
> USB problems



> .
> If you have any non-FTDI usb devices then you’ll definitely need driver
> updates. The FTDI serial adaptors are supported by the OS now and I would
> use the built in driver rather than installing the FTDI drivers unless you
> have trouble. They have been working great for me. I have tested the other
> USB devices that we support, the CM15 and older powerlinc devices from
> smarthome and they do appear to work. But as you’ve seen from emails to
> this list they seem to not reliably connect on startup all the time. I
> don’t actually use them on my live server anymore but I’ve not been able to
> duplicate those problems in any other test I can setup. So you MIGHT be ok
> even with those, or you might be one of the unlucky for some reason we
> don’t yet understand. The FTDI devices I do use a dozen of on my server and
> those have been trouble free even during multiple restarts and all the
> other juggling that I regularly do on that poor abused serve.


Well, I moved Xtension to the server running El Capitan. Same story.
Sad puppy.

My CM11A won't work because I have it on a TrendNet USB-Serial cable with a
Prolific chip.
I tried installing the Prolific drivers for Mac 10.8.  No joy.

I could order a new cable, but have a multi-port USB serial box from USB
Gear buried around here somewhere.  I never could get XTension to see it,
but I know more on how to find it now.
I just gotta hope it has an FTDI chip


So now I have a Geek Round Tuit calling to upgrade my other Macs, which
means to spring for the El Capitan version of Server.
That one got pretty overwhelmed just doing disk services, which include the
Time Machine server,  Crashplan, media server with Plex and more, and
whatever else I can throw at it.
I put 18TB on it with 4x6TB OWC RAID 5 array on FireWire 800.   It has 7TB
free.  |-{)


I added a drobo raid to the server a couple of years ago now and it’s been
> wonderful. with server I can backup all the house computers to it over time
> machine which makes me feel better than just having them in the old
> airport/timecapsule where they used to be. I’ve had external drives
> connected to that forever which keep failing on me, though the internal has
> been fine, it always made me nervous though. I’ve stopped by disk drives at
> SAMS club ;) So now with red line drives in the drobo and good externals
> connected to the time capsule I have each machine setup to backup to both
> places, time machine can alternate between multiple backup locations. There
> will be a backup no matter what! for my work machine here I also regularly
> run an rsync of my working code directory to a CF card I keep in the CF
> card reader all the time, so it’s like a second little drive. It’s always
> in sync with my code, then I backup to those 2 already mentioned locations
> and have a third time machine disk locally that it backs up to in sequence
> with the other two. And once a week or more I do a full image of the disk
> to an external disk. I’m a little paranoid but so far since my disks know
> how backed up they are they haven’t felt the need to fail. Apart from those
> cheap externals on the time capsule i haven’t had any real trouble that way
> in years. For the server, in addition to time machine to the drobo I also
> have it make a nightly bootable image backup also stored on the drobo via
> carbon copy cloner, if that drive fails I can restore the last nights image
> in just a few minutes and be up and running again.

The only problem I’ve had with Time Machine though is that with earlier
> versions of server I’ve had the disk image get silently corrupted in a way
> that my computer happily kept writing to it without generating any kind of
> error, but it could not be mounted. So I regularly enter time machine and
> make sure that it can actually display files from a few days back, if it
> can’t mount the image then all the days stored on that mage file will never
> display in the finder window. So far that hasn’t happened in El Captian, so
> maybe that is fixed. There is a special place in hell for someone who
> develops a backup solution that can continue to run in a total failure
> error condition without a single message to tell you something is wrong
> until you go to restore… So do verify the backups once in a while and
> create a new one if necessary.


Drobo scared the willies out of me because of the bad (early) user reports
of too-bad, so-sad you lose data and that you can't recover from a disk if
the box fails, and it always cost more.
I could have done UnRAID or such under Linux.

I've held out stubbornly even avoiding RAID because I can't read from a
single drive if it fails.   I have a Windows XP PC that's been gathering
dust because I blew the USB/keyboard fuse so I cna;'t control it, and it
has the proprietary Windows psuedo-hardware RAID where I can't get the data
off of the drives.

But managing what became 9 drives was too much work.  It takes a L-O-N-G
time to transfer 2TB even across Firewire 800.
I figure that if my OWC array dies, I can DRIVE there and get a new
enclosure to put the disks in.
There is no way to back up the 18TB for a home user, so it has to be a
final destination. (I guess I could buy like 4 5TB external backup drives,
but there I go again waiting for a week.)
Aside: I could transfer from Mac to Mac over Gigabit Ethernet faster than
the same copy on a single Mac, even when the drives on both sides are on
Firewire 800.

Besides Time Machine, and cloning with Carbon Copy Cloner, I have backups
going computer->computer and off site to the cloud with Crashplan, and I
know I can get files back because I've done it.

Now I might leave some interfaces on the new server and put the CM11A on
the old one, but then I'd have two different Xtension logs. I'll see.
Gotta find that box.

I'm closing up electric boxes so I was checking a new X10 wall controller
module.  Can you believe that I can't control powerline X10 modules on the
opposite wall of the same bedroom?  Gotta get that XTB in next.

I also can't receive on a RFX from a Oregon Scientific temperature sender
just 30 feet away under my enormous roof.   I'll be moving the RFX a little
closer and higher.
It never ends.

THANKS again, James!

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 8:04 AM, James Sentman <james at sentman.com> wrote:

>
> On Apr 14, 2016, at 8:13 PM, Mike Andrews <mikea0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Why is it only me that has these problems?
>
> I put a new SSD drive into the Mac Mini.
>
> I made an El Capitan Install partition on a USB drive.  It took literally
> 6 tries before it would install on the blank SSD, and that was only after I
> booted on the old disk partition running Mountain Lion.
>
>
> I LOVE SSD drives :) put one in my server recently and also in my wifes
> laptop, it was like getting a whole new machine for $200. I did my install
> in the opposite order though. While the machine still had it’s original
> drive in it I connected the SSD via a cheap USB adaptor and rebooted the
> disk into recovery mode. Installed the current OS fresh on the SSD. Then
> swapped it out, booted from it, ran the upgrade to El Capitan and all was
> fine. I wanted to start from scratch with this update so I did a clean
> install and did not copy over any of my data or apps until I had it all
> working.
>
> If you wanted to just replace your existing drive I would recommend again
> connecting the SSD with an external interface of some kind (these are not
> expensive and are very handy to have around) and use carbon copy cloner or
> that other imaging tool who’s name I forget to make a bootable clone of
> your internal drive to the external. Then swap them.
>
>
> Then Disk Utility under El Capitan is a buggy nightmare.    I wanted the
> make an backup OS X boot on an external 2TB hard drive along with a larger
> partition for data.
> I erased the drive. It immediately creates a new partition, formatted with
> HFS Journaled  taking up the whole 2TB and when I try to resize it say it
> doesn't have journaling, add it from teh menu. Destory, partition, repeat,
> repeat, repeat.  Every site I found said that Disk Utility works, but
> different.
>
>
> yea, the new disk utility is a disappointment. I know that 99.9% of people
> never want to do anything other than reformat a single partition drive but
> still what a pain it’s become. Luckily the command line tools are all still
> there and easy to use for this sort of thing.
>
>
> I restarted the Mac and Lo!  It works.
>
>
> Yea!
>
>
> Hack, hack, hack.  What if I was a mere mortal?
>
>
> If you were a mere mortal you wouldn’t be trying to create multiple
> partitions on the disk in the first place ;)
>
>
> The good thing is I have the sucker humming along fine and ready for
> XTension.  I even got Time Machine working tyo backup across the network to
> Mountain Lion Server on the old Xtension server.
>
>
> I am having some minor problems with time machine on El Capitan server.
> Problems I didn’t have with 10.9 server which was the one I upgraded to El
> Capitan from. The change to SMB for file sharing seems to have done
> something. Time Machine connections are still done over AFP, so the sharing
> system has to support both. Over time my file sharing speed to the machine
> drops off until it takes me 10 minutes to copy a new beta of XTension to
> the server for testing instead of the 30 seconds it should take. I did a
> lot of physical network debugging and found no problems until I restarted
> the server and the speed went back to normal. Looking at the file sharing
> control panel I see 14 AFP connections from my wifes laptop, all of them
> idle. 14 connections?! any AFP sharing has to be form time machine so what
> the heck is her machine doing? She doesn’t leave it open very long at any
> one time, using it for a bit and putting it to sleep, perhaps those
> connections don’t drop properly I don’t know, I have manually disconnected
> those connections but I can’t tell if that did the same good for the file
> sharing speed as restarting did. The activity monitor says that the apple
> file sharing server has 204 threads right now. My brain shuts down at the
> idea of 200+ threads running inside one application space. No wonder it
> hangs up! So keep an eye on that if you update to El Capitan. None of the
> other machines in the house cause that kind of hangup, just Becka’s so
> there’s something special about her ;) I will figure it out, it’s not a
> show stopper and probably won’t bite you but it’s something that has been
> frustrating me lately, and honestly I don’t need any more frustrating right
> now with all the construction going on around here ;)
>
> I have yet to move Xtension over, but I will shortly.  I'll see if I have
> USB problems.
>
>
> If you have any non-FTDI usb devices then you’ll definitely need driver
> updates. The FTDI serial adaptors are supported by the OS now and I would
> use the built in driver rather than installing the FTDI drivers unless you
> have trouble. They have been working great for me. I have tested the other
> USB devices that we support, the CM15 and older powerlinc devices from
> smarthome and they do appear to work. But as you’ve seen from emails to
> this list they seem to not reliably connect on startup all the time. I
> don’t actually use them on my live server anymore but I’ve not been able to
> duplicate those problems in any other test I can setup. So you MIGHT be ok
> even with those, or you might be one of the unlucky for some reason we
> don’t yet understand. The FTDI devices I do use a dozen of on my server and
> those have been trouble free even during multiple restarts and all the
> other juggling that I regularly do on that poor abused serve.
>
>
> So now I have a Geek Round Tuit calling to upgrade my other Macs, which
> means spring for the El Capitan version of Server.
> That one got pretty overwhelmed just doing disk services, which include
> the Time Machine sever,  Crashplan, media server with Plex and more, and
> whatever else I can throw at it.
> I put 18TB on it with 4x6TB OWC RAID 5 array on FireWire 800.   It has 7TB
> free.  |-{)
>
>
> I added a drobo raid to the server a couple of years ago now and it’s been
> wonderful. with server I can backup all the house computers to it over time
> machine which makes me feel better than just having them in the old
> airport/timecapsule where they used to be. I’ve had external drives
> connected to that forever which keep failing on me, though the internal has
> been fine, it always made me nervous though. I’ve stopped by disk drives at
> SAMS club ;) So now with red line drives in the drobo and good externals
> connected to the time capsule I have each machine setup to backup to both
> places, time machine can alternate between multiple backup locations. There
> will be a backup no matter what! for my work machine here I also regularly
> run an rsync of my working code directory to a CF card I keep in the CF
> card reader all the time, so it’s like a second little drive. It’s always
> in sync with my code, then I backup to those 2 already mentioned locations
> and have a third time machine disk locally that it backs up to in sequence
> with the other two. And once a week or more I do a full image of the disk
> to an external disk. I’m a little paranoid but so far since my disks know
> how backed up they are they haven’t felt the need to fail. Apart from those
> cheap externals on the time capsule i haven’t had any real trouble that way
> in years. For the server, in addition to time machine to the drobo I also
> have it make a nightly bootable image backup also stored on the drobo via
> carbon copy cloner, if that drive fails I can restore the last nights image
> in just a few minutes and be up and running again.
>
> The only problem I’ve had with Time Machine though is that with earlier
> versions of server I’ve had the disk image get silently corrupted in a way
> that my computer happily kept writing to it without generating any kind of
> error, but it could not be mounted. So I regularly enter time machine and
> make sure that it can actually display files from a few days back, if it
> can’t mount the image then all the days stored on that mage file will never
> display in the finder window. So far that hasn’t happened in El Captian, so
> maybe that is fixed. There is a special place in hell for someone who
> develops a backup solution that can continue to run in a total failure
> error condition without a single message to tell you something is wrong
> until you go to restore… So do verify the backups once in a while and
> create a new one if necessary.
>
>
> Now I may get a newer Mac Mini for that purpose and flip the uses of these
> servers, saving one as a desktop server.
>
> It never ends, but I'm a happy Geek.
>
> I also figured out a hairy problem with my Android tablets.  I turns out
> that it is really important to have fresh USB cables for fast charging.
> That only cost me about 3 days of cussing.
>
>
> I actually prefer the way that android does this vs apple. I could be
> wrong but what I understand is that they just keep ramping up the amperage
> until the voltage starts to sag or until they reach their limit. This way
> they can max out the available output on any charging device. Apple tries
> to talk to the device and ask it if it can send more power, or does some
> other validation of the data lines or something and so won’t fast charge
> from adaptors that don’t support that. I believe you can build a dongle
> adaptor thing that will let iPhones fast charge but I haven’t played with
> that just add one more thing to the list ;)
>
> Allright, I’ve had my coffee and morning ramble to the list it’s time to
> write a little code.
>
>
> Thanks,
>  James
>
>
> James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org
> <http://www.planetarygear.org> http://MacHomeAutomation.com
> <http://machomeautomation.com>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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