Inspired by I-57

Perhaps I am the only person that this applies to, but in case not:

I store all my music, mp3s and m4us, on a network share. We do this because my wife and I share an iTunes account, the server’s backed up, etc, etc. Now we both can get to our tunes.

For some reason, though, my mac will eventually time out the SMB share to my fileserver. When iTunes starts up, it will look for the music in my library, and it won’t be there, and 99.5% of my music is unavailable, and iTunes puts an exclamation mark next to it.

I used to man up, mount the share, and tell iTunes to play every song on the share. Apparently, this is not required, and the solution is obvious–

Quit iTunes. Mount share. Start iTunes. All your music is “back”.

I’m a doofus for not thinking of that.

Tonight, for some reason, I couldn’t sync my iphone on my macbook pro. There were a lot of upgrades recently for me (latest itunes, finally got arround to installing 10.5.5, etc) which could have been the issue, but the error itself was wildly unhelpful.

Fortunately, on the apple support forums, someone named neil had the quick fix: itunes apparently barfs if ANY file it wants to look at is locked (an old apple-ism that should be removed from the filesystem, post haste).

Anyway, the fix is a snap. Open the Script Editor in the /Applications/AppleScript/ folder and run the following:

tell application "Finder"
set locked of every item of entire contents of folder "Music:iTunes" of home to false
end tell

Once that’s pasted in, click the run button. If you still have troubles syncing, replace the Music:iTunes path with Music, and perhaps also Photos.

The original thread on the apple support forums is here.

The network printer component of the MFC-7820N is easy in leopard– it’s detected by the mDNS (bonjour), and the drivers are preinstalled. Everything there should be smooth sailing.

However, we wanted this printer partly because it’s a network scanner, as well. Getting the network scanner component working under Leopard turned out to have a slight trick.

First, install the drivers:

1. Go to the brother download site
2. choose Drivers -> Mac OS/X 10.5 -> English then hit submit
3. Install this driver, it’s the scanner TWAIN driver. It’s universal too
4. This driver will make you reboot. Whee.
5. Go back to the download site, and this time, do Utilities -> Mac OS/X 10.5 -> English
6. Install the provided “Remote Setup Software”

Now, here’s the fun trick. Open your hard drive, and go to the folder /Library/Printers/Brother/Utilities/DeviceSelector. In this dir is a program called DeviceSelector . Run it.

Tell the DeviceSelector (and the scanner driver) to “Specify your machine by address”, and enter the IP address of your printer. (Mine was preset to specify by ‘name’, which is using mDNS).

From there, I could now scan through the control center applet or in a standard Twain app, like Image Capture in the /Applications folder.

For reasons I don’t understand, if you’re running linux inside of Parallels on a mac, you can’t just add a usb flash drive and have it recognized.

However, you CAN make it work, you just have to work at it.

Here’s what works for me:

1. Create a new vm, point it at a knoppix cd.
2. Edit the USB controller settings and make sure it is NOT autocapturing devices
3. WITHOUT Parallels running, insert the usb stick.
4. Open the finder. If the usb stick is mounted, unmount it. It won’t work with it mounted.
5. Start your VM. At the knoppix prompt, enter “knoppix irqpoll”. You can add other settings, like “lang=us 2″
6. Let it boot
7. Now, pull down the devices menu, go to the usb sub menu, and capture your memory stick
8. Wait. Linux will auto discover the stick. it will throw out some errors about irq9 being ignored, and then capture the stick as a scsi device
9. Now you can use it as you want.

It’s that time again for me, where I upgrade the home file server and re-purpose some old hard drives. And with the upcoming Time Machine backup program in the upcoming MacOS X 10.5, an external 300GB drive makes a lot of sense here.

But, oddly, Disk Utility won’t format the darn thing. The drive was on a linux server, and it sees it, lets me configure the partition, but then it hangs forever, not apparently doing anything.

Some searching turned up this excellent article , or actually, the second comment. It describes the exact problem, and points out that you can format the drive nearly instantly in windows with the MacDrive tool from MediaFour .

Download the trial version and install it, it does the trick (limited to 5 days though). I did this in Parallels, actually. If you want to do it this way, force-quit your hung Disk Utility window, then remove and reconnect the drive. Start Parrallels, install the software, then click on the little usb icon in the bottom left corner of your window and capture your external drive (listed as “PATA IDE Bridge” for me). Then run MacDrive, format it (took 60s), release the drive from the usb tab and it should be mounted in your finder already.

The price is not even unreasonable, $50 or $20 for an upgrade. I see old versions on ebay for as low as $1 if you want to be legal.

Update 12/15/06: You might check out the new Parallels Transporter beta, http://forum.parallels.com/thread5999.html It looks like this will do all the below, but without the ftp
server in the middle?

Please note that you absolutely require at least Parallels build 1940 to run G4U.

1. On your new mac, go to the Accounts control panel and create a user named “install”. Give it a password. You’ll need this account later.
2. While you’re in the control panels, go to Sharing and enable the FTP server.
3. On your OLD mac:
4. download the g4u (”ghost for unix”) iso at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-1.17.iso.zip . Unzip
5. Fire up your Virtual PC, and capture the above ISO in your CDrom. Reboot if neccessary so that you boot off of it.
6. Make a note of how large this disk image is.
7. When you get a prompt, you want to copy your disk to your new server. Assuming you have one disk and one partition on this disk, use something like uploaddisk yournewmacip diskimage.gz wd0 .
8. wd0 is the name that g4u knows your first disk as.
9. diskimage.gz is the name your disk will be saved as on your new mac
10. Wait until the disk is entirely copied. At this point you can close your virtual pc program.
11. Now, go to your NEW mac
12. Download the g4u (”ghost for unix”) iso at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-1.17.iso.zip . Unzip
13. Fire up Parallels and create a new guest OS. Give it a hard drive at least as large as what the Virutal PC guest had
14. Boot your new GuestOS. Capture the G4U iso, and reboot the guest if necessary to boot it.
15. When it’s finished booting, run the following command to download and unpack your disk image: slurpdisk localhost diskimage.gz
16. Wait for this to finish.
17. Uncapture the cd rom, and reboot your GuestOS.
18. Go to your sharing control panel, and turn off FTP
19. Go to your accounts panel, and delete the install account

At this point, you should have a working copy of your original Guest OS.

For more information, please see the G4U home page at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/