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January 30, 2008

Multiple IPs on a single ethernet interface under OS X

Turns out it's easy, and you can even do it from the GUI. Just go to System Preferences:Network, select Show Network Port Configurations, and duplicate the interface you want two IPs on. Then edit the new interface's IP, et voila. That's for Tiger, anyway. Leopard uses the "+/-" style of list item duplication, but it seems to work more or less the same way.


January 17, 2008

More Leopard fun - RAID!

I have a PPC Mac Mini at the house, with which I do remote backups for the office and for various other stuff. I have two Lacie 300GB drives in a RAID, which I set up under OS X 10.4. I recently upgraded to Leopard, and noticed that one of the disks in the RAID had become a "Spare" rather than a full RAID slice (I'm just mirroring), so I went to go fix that in Disk Utility, which I have learned is apparently broken and stupid. If you want to tell OS X Leopard that a disk is a member of the RAID set, one would think it would be as simple as using the handy pulldown menu provided, which gives you a choice after you select a disk in the list, to modify it from a "Spare" to a "RAID Slice". Well, appearances can be deceiving, because that doesn't do anything. You have to use diskutil from the command line instead, and run

diskutil addToRAID member [nameofdisktoadd] [nameofraiddisk]

Fortunately, this seems to have worked, and it only takes a billion hours for the RAID set to rebuild.

I also have a couple of smaller Lacie "Porsche" disks, both of which were once parts of two separate RAID arrays, until I noticed they were really hot when stacked and so did our cat, Mara, who likes to sleep on warm things. So, I lost one of each disk when she jumped off the stack for fear of being beaten bodily about the head and neck for using our remote backup system and music library as an electric blanket. Live and learn.

The problem is that the 160GB disks were in a RAID, and then the RAID only had the one disk. I kept it in the RAID, figuring it was less risky than deleting the RAID and just using it as a single disk. When I upgraded to Leopard, and went to go update my RAIDs to version 2, I had a change of heart and deleted the RAID set that contained the remaining 160GB disk. Sadly, the result seems to have been that OS X doesn't recognize the drive, which naturally contains all of my iTunes library, some digital photos, and the like.

When I go to mount the drive, in Disk Utility, it tells me to run First Aid, but the buttons are greyed out and non-functional (though the microscope icon that says "Verify" does work, but it fails with "Unrecognized Filesystem" error). It says it's an "Apple_Boot_Raid" partition, so it's likely that removing the RAID screwed something up in a big way. I could see if I can get the old companion disk to mount, in hopes that it still remembers it was part of that RAID set, long enough to get the other disk to rebuild... I have the music on a spare drive, anyway. I'll lose some pics, but I already lost most of the pics in a previous crash, so it can't suck that much more.

ANyway, the shine is really starting to wear off Leopard. Time Machine? Great. But Spaces isn't as good as Virtual Desktop Pro, the Terminal is astonishing me by apparently breeding Window settings like rabbits for no good reason, and now this.