VMworld is on this week. I still find the virtual format (and timezones) challenging, and I miss the hallway track and the jet lag. There’s nonetheless some good news coming out of the event. One thing that was announced prior to the event was Tanzu Community Edition. William Lam talks more about that here.
Speaking of VMworld news, Viktor provided a great summary on the various “projects” being announced. You can read more here.
I’ve been a Mac user for a long time, and there’s stuff I’m learning every week via Howard Oakley’s blog. Check out this article covering the Recovery Partition. While I’m at it, this presentation he did on Time Machine is also pretty ace.
Facebook had a little problem this week, and the Cloudflare folks have provided a decent overview of what happened. As someone who works for a service provider, this kind of stuff makes me twitchy.
Fibre Channel? Cloud? Chalk and cheese? Maybe. Read Chin-Fah’s article for some more insights. Personally, I miss working with FC, but I don’t miss the arguing I had to do with systems and networks people when it came to the correct feeding and watering of FC environments.
Remote working has been a challenge for many organisations, with some managers not understanding that their workers weren’t just watching streaming video all day, but actually being more productive. Not everything needs to be a video call, however, and this post / presentation has a lot of great tips on what does and doesn’t work with distributed teams.
I’ve had to ask this question before. And Jase has apparently had to answer it too, so he’s posted an article on vSAN and external storage here.
This is the best response to a trio of questions I’ve read in some time.
VMware Cloud Director 10.3 went GA recently, and this post will point you in the right direction when it comes to planning the upgrade process.
Speaking of VMware products hitting GA, VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3 became available about a week ago. You can read more about that here.
My friend Tony knows a bit about NSX-T, and certificates, so when he bumped into an issue with NSX-T and certificates in his lab, it was no big deal to come up with the fix.
I haven’t talked to the good folks at StarWind in a while (I miss you Max!), but this article on the new All-NVMe StarWind Backup Appliance by Paolo made for some interesting reading.
I loved this article from Chin-Fah on storage fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). I’ve seen a fair bit of it slung about having been a customer and partner of some big storage vendors over the years.
This whitepaper from Preston on some of the challenges with data protection and long-term retention is brilliant and well worth the read.
Finally, I don’t know how I came across this article on hacking Playstation 2 machines, but here you go. Worth a read if only for the labels on some of the discs.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at Dell Technologies closely, but Tech Field Day recently ran an event and Pietro put together a pretty comprehensive view of what was covered.
Dr Bruce Davie is a smart guy, and this article over at El Reg on decentralising Internet services made for some interesting reading.
Clean installs and Time Machine system recoveries on macOS aren’t as nice as they used to be. I found this out a day or two before this article was published. It’s worth reading nonetheless, particularly if you want to get your head around the various limitations with Recovery Mode on more modern Apple machines.
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll likely realise I listen to records a lot. I don’t do it because they “sound better” though, I do it because it works for me as a more active listening experience. There are plenty of clowns on the Internet ready to tell you that it’s a “warmer” sound. They’re wrong. I’m not saying you should fight them, but if you find yourself in an argument this article should help.
Speaking of technologies that have somewhat come and gone (relax – I’m joking!), this article from Chris M. Evans on HCI made for some interesting reading. I always liked the “start small” approach with HCI, particularly when comparing it to larger midrange storage systems. But things have definitely changed when it comes to available storage and converged options.
This post is really about the boring stuff I do when I have a day off and isn’t terribly exciting. TL;DR I had some problems upgrading to Catalina, and had to start from scratch.
Background
I’ve had an Apple Mac since around 2008. I upgraded from a 24″ iMac to a 27″ iMac and was super impressed with the process of migrating between machines, primarily because of Time Machine’s ability to recover settings, applications, and data in a fairly seamless fashion. I can’t remember what version of macOS I started with (maybe Leopard?), but I’ve moved steadily through the last few versions with a minimal amount of fuss. I was running Mojave on my iMac late last year when I purchased a refurbished 2018 Mac mini. At the time, I decided not to upgrade to Catalina, as I’d had a few issues with my work laptop and didn’t need the aggravation. So I migrated from the iMac to the Mac mini and kept on keeping on with Mojave.
Fast forward to April this year, and the Mac mini gave up the ghost. With Apple shutting down its stores here in response to COVID-19, it was a 2 week turnaround at the local repair place to get the machine fixed. In the meantime, I was able to use Time Machine to load everything on a 2012 MacBook Pro that was being used sparingly. It was a bit clunky, but had an internal SSD and 16GB of RAM, so it could handle the basics pretty comfortably. When the Mac mini was repaired, I used Time Machine once again to move everything back. It’s important to note that this is everything (settings, applications, and data) that had been accumulated since 2008. So there’s a bit of cruft associated with this build. A bunch of 32-bit applications that I’d lost track of, widgets that were no longer really in use, and so on.
The Big Update
I took the day off on Friday last week. I’d been working a lot of hours since COVID-19 restrictions kicked in here, and I’d been filling my commuting time with day job work (sorry blog!). I thought it would be fun to upgrade the Mac mini to Catalina. I felt that things were in a reasonable enough state that I could work with what it had to offer, and I get twitchy when there’s an upgrade notification on the Settings icon. Just sitting there, taunting me.
I downloaded the installer and pressed on. No dice, my system volume wasn’t formatted with APFS. How could this be? Well, even though APFS has been around for a little while now, I’d been moving my installation across various machines. At the time when the APFS conversion was part of the macOS upgrade, I was running an iMac with a spinning disk as the system volume, and so it never prompted to do that upgrade. When I moved to the Mac mini, I didn’t do any macOS upgrade, so I guess it just kept working with the HFS+ volume. It seems a bit weird that Catalina doesn’t offer a workaround for this, but I may just have been looking in the wrong place. Now, there was a lot of chatter in the forums about rebooting into Recovery Mode and converting the drive to an APFS volume. No matter what I tried, I was unable to do this effectively (either using the Recovery Mode console with Mojave or with Catalina booting from USB). I followed articles like this one but just didn’t have the same experience. And when I erased the system drive and attempted to recover from Time Machine backups, it would re-erase the volume as HFS+. So, I don’t know, I guess I’m an idiot. The solution that finally worked for me was to erase the drive, format it as APFS, install Mojave from scratch, and recover from a Time Machine backup. Unfortunately, though, this seemed to only want to transfer around 800KB of settings data. The normal “wait a few hours while we copy your stuff” just didn’t happen. Sod knows why, but what I did know was that I was really wasting my day off with this stuff.
I also ran in to an issue trying to do the installation from USB. You can read about booting from external devices and the T2 security chip here, here, and here. I lost patience with the process and took a different approach.
Is That So Bad?
Not really. I have my Photos library and iTunes media on a separate volume. I have one email account that we have used POP with over the years, but I installed Thunderbird, recovered the profile from my Time Machine data, and modified profiles.ini to point to that profile (causing some flashbacks to my early days on a help desk supporting a Netscape user base). The other thing I had to do was recover my Plex database. You can read more on that here. It actually went reasonably well. I’d been storing my iPhone backups on a separate volume too, and had to follow this process to relocate those backup files. Otherwise, Microsoft, to their credit, has made the reinstallation process super simple with Microsoft 365. Once I had most everything setup again, I was able to perform the upgrade to Catalina.
Conclusion
If this process sounds like it was a bit of a pain, it was. I don’t know that Apple has necessarily dropped the ball in terms of usability in the last few years, but sometimes it feels like it. I think I just had really high expectations based on some good fortune I’d enjoyed over the past 12 years. I’m not sure what the term is exactly, but it’s possible that because I’ve invested this much money in a product, I’m more forgiving of the issues associated with the product. Apple has done a great job historically of masking the complexity of technology from the end user. Sometimes, though, you’re going to come across odd situations that potentially push you down an odd path. That’s what I tell myself anyway as I rue the time I lost on this upgrade. Was anyone else’s upgrade to Catalina this annoying?
Welcome to Random Short Take #31. Lot of good players have worn 31 in the NBA. You’d think I’d call this the Reggie edition (and I appreciate him more after watching Winning Time), but this one belongs to Brent Barry. This may be related to some recency bias I have, based on the fact that Brent is a commentator in NBA 2K19, but I digress …
I find Plex to be a pretty rock solid application experience, and most of the problems I’ve had with it have been client-related. I recently had a problem with a server update that borked my installation though, and had to roll back. Here’s the quick and dirty way to do that on macOS.
I recently had the chance to speak with Michael Jack from Datadobi about the company’s announcement about its new DIY Starter Pack for NAS migrations. Whilst it seems that the professional services market for NAS migrations has diminished over the last few years, there’s still plenty of data out there that needs to be moved from on box to another. Robocopy and rsync aren’t always the best option when you need to move this much data around.
There are a bunch of things that people need to learn to do operations well. A lot of them are learnt the hard way. This is a great list from Jan Schaumann.
Analyst firms are sometimes misunderstood. My friend Enrico Signoretti has been working at GigaOm for a little while now, and I really enjoyed this article on the thinking behind the GigaOm Radar.
Alastair isn’t just a great writer and moustache aficionado, he’s also a trainer across a number of IT disciplines, including AWS. He recently posted this useful article on what AWS newcomers can expect when it comes to managing EC2 instances.
Want some news? In a shorter format? And a little bit random? This listicle might be for you.
Remember Retrospect? They were acquired by StorCentric recently. I hadn’t thought about them in some time, but they’re still around, and celebrating their 30th anniversary. Read a little more about the history of the brand here.
Sometimes size does matter. This article around deduplication and block / segment size from Preston was particularly enlightening.
This article from Russ had some great insights into why it’s not wise to entirely rule out doing things the way service providers do just because you’re working in enterprise. I’ve had experience in both SPs and enterprise and I agree that there are things that can be learnt on both sides.
If you’re thinking of updating your Mac’s operating environment, this is a fairly comprehensive review of what macOS Catalina has to offer, along with some caveats.
Anthony has been doing a bunch of cool stuff with Terraform recently, including using variable maps to deploy vSphere VMs. You can read more about that here.
Speaking of people who work at Veeam, Hal has put together a great article on orchestrating Veeam recovery activities to Azure.
Finally, the Brisbane VMUG meeting originally planned for Tuesday 8th has been moved to the 15th. Details here.
Here are some links to some random news items and other content that I recently found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 17 – am I over-sharing? There’s so much I want you to know about.
I seem to always be including a link from the Backblaze blog. That’s mainly because they write about things I’m interested in. In this case, they’ve posted an article discussing the differences between availability and durability that I think is worth your time.
Maintaining the data protection theme, Alastair wrote an interesting article titled “The Best Automation Is One You Don’t Write” (you know, like the best IO is one you don’t need to do?) as part of his work with Cohesity. It’s a good article, and not just because he mentions my name in it.
I recently wanted to change the edition of Microsoft Office I was using on my MacBook Pro and couldn’t really work out how to do it. In the end, the answer is simple. Download a Microsoft utility to remove your Office licenses, and then fire up an Office product and it will prompt you to re-enter your information at that point.
This is an old article, but it answered my question about validating MD5 checksums on macOS.
Oh hey, Flixster Video is closing down. I received this in my inbox recently: “[f]ollowing the announcement by UltraViolet that it will be discontinuing its service on July 31, 2019, we are writing to provide you notice that Flixster Video is planning to shut down its website, applications and operations on October 31, 2019”. It makes sense, obviously, given UltraViolet’s demise, but it still drives me nuts. The ephemeral nature of digital media is why I still have a house full of various sized discs with various kinds of media stored on them. I think the answer is to give yourself over to the streaming lifestyle, and understand that you’ll never “own” media like you used to think you did. But I can’t help but feel like people outside of the US are getting shafted in that scenario.
In keeping up with the “random” theme of these posts, it was only last week that I learned that “Television, the Drug of the Nation” from the very excellent album “Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury” by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy was originally released by Michael Franti and Rono Tse when they were members of The Beatnigs. If you’re unfamiliar with any of this I recommend you check them out.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
