First off all, i am not really sure if that problem is only limited to 10.5 even if it started with 10.5 for me.

To get the magic point my hardware setup:

• Mac Pro ( Mac OS X 10.5.1)
• MacBook (Mac OS X 10.5.1)
• MacBookPro (Mac OSX 10.5.1)
• FreeNAS (FreeNas embedded)

The FreeNAS (BSD-based) box is something like my Media-storage device, using RAID1.

As all my system can handle SMB/CIFS and AFP (ignoring ftp etc..)i started thinking about what to use.

First guess would be using AFP cause its an Apple Protocol and i would expect it to work in a proper way on all Mac OS X boxes.

Reality-Check:

1. Finder:

AFP wins regarding access-speed of Network mounted files inside Finder. Best example was the photography-lib of my girlfriend with a huge amount of files.

2. Stability:

100 % win for SMB/CIFS.

I am having a shit-load of Kernel panics while streaming or moving files to an AFP mounted drive. In most cases that Kernel Panics occurs in the first minute of the action.

This is a fact and can be reproduced on my boxes quite easy.

Here a short quote of the Log:

I called Apples hotline to ask if this is a known issue.

Stupid idea.

Seems like the Apple hotline (at least in germany) is covered by us-marines (at least it sounds like that) guys using a windows-based-chat-system to ask real-pro’s for help if you call them. Most of my time was enjoying stupid music, as my supporter had to ask his pro-supporter for each single step.

Like that:

Him: Can you open System Profiler

Me: actually it is already open

Him: ok wait

(took about 1 or 2 minutess)

Him: can you navigate to logs

Me: done

Him: ok wait

(took about 1-2 minutes)

Him: Is there something written in THE log about Kernel Panic ?

Me: If you really want to use System Profilder for that …ok. In which of the listed logs should i search ? I can offer….

Him: wait

…you know that part already…

Him: Software

Me: Actually there is no Software log browsing logs this way. software is the parent category inside System Profilder for the entry logs dude. Btw there is something like console.app to search your logs, which makes much more sense from my point of view….

Him: wait….

…..i guess you know what comes here…..

I am not kidding right now.

After explaining my basic problem (including some really basics about AFP etc……yeah you dont have to know what that is…you can support even without knowing anything…doh) i was told to run AHT and hold the line…..

haha.

After explaning the usual amount of time an extensive AHT needs i ended the phone-call, disabled AFP File sharing on all Leopard boxes and enjoy my re-gained stability.
Conclusion:

To be honest, AFP is not usable at all in my small environment. I really would like to use it, cause of its performance / speed inside Finder, but having repeating Kernel Panics is not the way to go.

James Duncan wrote an interessting article about restoring a Leopard installation from Time Machine.

His conclusion as quote:

In short, Time Machine passed the “Trust, but Verify” challenge with flying colors. I’m pretty happy about that as it means that I can recommend that my friends and family—including my Dad who just bought an iMac not too long ago—can use Time Machine as a totally automatic backup mechanism. There are, however, two caveats to using Time Machine as your only backup strategy. The first is that you really should keep your data in at least three places and one of those places should be offsite. You should either continue with your existing offsite backup strategy for your most important documents or maybe you should consider rotating two disks as Time Machine volumes. Then again, if you’re currently not backing up at all, having even a single Time Machine backup volume is a massive improvement.

The second caveat is that restoring from a Time Machine backup is not particularly fast. If you often find yourself on deadline, hitting a half-day’s worth of downtime due to a hard drive crash might not be acceptable to you. In fact, if you have a hard drive crash, you may be looking at a full day’s worth of downtime by the time you secure a new disk and install it. For folks like my Dad, this kind of thing isn’t too big an inconvenience. You can start up a backup, go off and do something else, and come back to a restored system. However, it’s the kind of thing that I’d like to try to avoid in my day to day work, especially when I’m on deadline. If this sounds like you, you’ll want to look at having a ready copy of your boot volume by using a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner. SuperDuper! has also been a great Mac OS X choice, but isn’t quite ready for Leopard yet. Hopefully, it will be soon.

Great……i was just going to test it myself…..but now ?

Yeah right…..Trust….but Verify hehe

till now i am using dockless to hide several app’s from my dock.

Best example is Namely, which is installed on all my macs, but i really dont want to see the application Icons all day long.

Well, today i found an alternative to Dockless called: Dock Dodger

Found an interesting hint on theappleblog.com

Basicly the hint is based on the following hint

About:

Take, for example, the Finder’s “Open With…” contextual menu item. If you right click on a file, “Open With…” gives you the option to open the document with something other than its default associated application. Thing is, oftentimes you’ll see apps in there that have long been excised from your computer. What gives?

Sounds good ? check the links above and read one of those articles. Both cover the topic somehow similar.

My collegue at work showed me PicturePopPro today.

Basicly  its a Graphic Viewer as Context-Menu.

A quote from the project page:

PicturePopPro (initialy named PicturePop) was born in 2001. It was one of the first contextual menu plugins for MacOS X, and the first picture viewer as contextual menu plugin for MacOSX. PPP2 is designed to work on all PowerPC macs, from 10.3.9 to 10.4.x, especially with less memory [on low configuration]. With Tiger, Apple has introduced a contextual menu with similar diaporama functionality but.. just test PPP2 and compare.. PPP2 offers fast browsing-viewing-searching-marking-actions. With the help of donations, PPP 2.0 is now ready for intel. Check donation page to learn more about it.

I guess i will use it in addition to my basic image viewer (Xee.app)

Mike Barton wrote a good article on pcworld.com about:

MacBook Air amiss: time to licence Mac OS X

Found this quoted post on daringfireball.net:

Brandon Walkin:

Apple has released their updated HIG with well thought out Leopard specific information such as making 512px icons, system provided images, transparent panels, and window-frame controls

Well as most of us already know….Apple recently released a new Macbook called:

• MacBook Air (MBA)

MacWorld.com has published an article about its first tests with the new Apple Hardware.

Quote as teaser:

Speaking of Speedmark, the MacBook Air’s score of 123 is the lowest score we’ve recorded for any Intel-based Mac laptop, but it does handily beat our PowerPC laptop reference system, the 1.67Ghz 15-inch PowerBook G4.

Candybar from Panic is a well-known software which allows it easily to change default icons used in Mac OS S. Unfortunaly CandyBar is not free….so i was searching for a free alternative.

Seems  like i found it…called: LiteIcon

quote from the project page:

LiteIcon is a simple app which allows you to change your system icons easily.

Simply drag an icon onto the one you want to change, click the Apply Changes button and restart the Finder to see the modifications. That’s it.

To restore an icon, right-click it and pick Restore. To restore all icons to their originals, go to File -> Restore all icons…

Apple implemented DTrace into 10.5 Leopard which can be used to monitor applications and much more.

Sun as DTrace founder describes DTrace as:

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

Its pretty nice that we have this tool now in 10.5 but like always its not totally perfect=)

Adam Leventhal explains the limitations of Apples DTrace in his blog

Quote:

So Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don’t permit tracing. This is antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source. I’m sure this was inserted under pressure from ISVs, but that makes the pill no easier to swallow. To say that Apple has crippled DTrace on Mac OS X would be a bit alarmist, but they’ve certainly undermined its efficacy and, in doing do, unintentionally damaged some of its most basic functionality. To users of Mac OS X and of DTrace: Apple has done a service by porting DTrace, but let’s convince them to go one step further and port it properly.

Links:

• My last blog-entry regarding DTrace
• German ::: heise.de about apple and DTrace