OS X Mavericks - No disk space on startup disk - files that can be deleted

After re-imaging a new Macbook Pro 13", I discovered that it only had a 120GB Hard Drive. The Disk Image I use takes up all of this space, so files have to be deleted. The applications that take the most disk space are:

Soundtrack Pro Loops
DVD Studio Pro Content
Motion Content
LiveType Content
Logic Content

so, after imaging these machines type this in to remove these things:

rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Audio/Apple\ Loops/Apple/Apple\ Loops\ for\ Soundtrack\ Pro/
rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Application\ Support/Final\ Cut\ Studio/DVD\ Studio\ Pro/
rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Application\ Support/Final\ Cut\ Studio/Motion/         
rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Application\ Support/LiveType/
rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Application\ Support/Logic/

Should make about 57.05GB

As the MacBook Pro is for a manager, these applications arent' needed.

Mavericks Black Screen with Cursor (mouse)

Just encountered two Mac Mini's which, when turned on, show a black screen with a cursor which moves when you move the mouse. cmd + alt + esc doesn't do anything.

Tried:

1. reset PRAM
2. SafeBoot (hold down shift)
3. hold down cmd + s and type "/sbin/fsck -yf"

I gave up and reimaged these macs.

Did a bit of research afterwards and found this apple discussions on it. There were two suggested fixes. One involved blindly logging in which isn't an ICT Technician friendly fix. However, Spiro.r suggested:

1. ssh 192.160.0.1 -l username
2. sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
3. sudo rm /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist
4. sudo rm /private/var/db/.AppleUpgrade
5. reboot


As ssh is by default turned off, you could also do this in single user mode (hold down cmd + s).

Apparently it is a problem with updates. It basically wants you to log in and OK an update, but seems to stop the login screen appearing. Not entirely sure anyone knows what's happening, but deleting these preference files and .AppleUpgrade fixes it. I shall try it next time I see it.

Apple Remote Desktop ARD preferences and presets transfer

It's always good to have a backup of all the preferences and tasks you have saved in ARD. I thought I had it sussed,  just need the file:

~/Library/Prefeences/com.apple.remotedesktop.plist

Turns out as of version 3.7 it's all been 'sandbox'ed. That means these prefences files have been moved to:
~/Library/Container/com.apple.remotedesktop/Library/Preferences/com.apple.remotedesktop.plist

But not only this, it has to have the right ACL's (permissions)

What I tried to do is copy this file between accounts and it ended up replacing the copied file with a blank one every time. It wasn't until I read this post which mentioned resetting ACL's. THis is the command they suggested using:

{ sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -R $UID:staff ~ $_ ; sudo chmod -R u+rwX ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ ; } 2> /dev/null
So first I copied the com.apple.remotedesktop.plist file to  

~/Library/Container/com.apple.remotedesktop/Library/Preferences/com.apple.remotedesktop.plist

I then ran the command in terminal.

Then I logged out and back in again.

Crash bang wollop it worked.

Cheers

Mavericks "The software for the printer was installed incorrectly" error

After reimaging a computer suite with Mavericks and installing a networked printer via "Profile Manager" mobileconfig files, the printer had an exclamation mark next to it in the print dialogue box. When a print was sent to the queue, the print queue would load up and prompt the error:

"The software for the printer was installed incorrectly.
Would you like it to be repaired?"

After clicking "Repair" you are prompted with an Administrator Username and Password dialogue box.

I needed to find a way of "repairing" all these machines via ARD or Profile Manager. Looking in console, I found that the error was due to:
"/Library/Printers/hp/filter/hpPostProcessing.bundle/Contents/MacOS/hpPostProcessing" has insecure permissions (0100775/uid=0/gid=80)"

I found this forum which mentions the fix which is to change owner and permissions.

I ran a few commands to first change the owner, which needs to be Wheel, and the permissions with need to be 755. After doing so, I needed to reboot to see if it had fixed it, only to come up with more errors due to insecure permissions of the containing folders. After continuously doing this it finally fixed it.

I ended up running a command which changed the permissions for the whole /Library/Printers folder recursively:

chmod -R g-w /Library/Printers/
chown -R root:wheel /Library/Printers/

This needs to be run as root, which is an option in ARD, or you can put "sudo" before each line.

Mavericks Server Deploy Studio Multicasting tests

I read the wiki page on multicasting from the Deploy Studio wiki pages.

When I'm imaging one machine, I'm getting a download rate of 8.5MB/s, and a variable write rate, but it is a compressed image. When I put 5 machines on, I'm getting about 1MB/s download rate, which is too slow for my liking, especially with a 89GB Image file.

The server is a new (2014 - July) mac mini server, 8GB RAM, 2 x SSD 256GB, Mirror RAID. Deploy Studio 1.6.11

Repository is stored on another server, on a different subnet which might cause issues? Shared via CIFS.

The Server is on GigaBit LAN so I'm trying a 10MB/s stream rate to start with.

The computer suite I'm testing on are Mac Mini's from 2011, 4GB RAM, 500GB SATA HD's.

To get the Client Write Disk Speed I put in this command in the terminal:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=1024 count=1048576
Password:
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 18.062331 secs (59446470 bytes/sec)

This converts to 59MB/s

Test 1

clients: 5
Stream Data Rate: 10MBs
Client Disk Speed: 43MBs

Conclusion: Got about 20 fails on each computer before 2% of a 89GB compressed image.

Realised I didn't scan for restore. At this point I scanned the image for restore using Disk Utility on Server.

Test 2

clients: 2
Stream Data Rate 10MBs
Client Disk Speed: 42MBs

Conclusion: Got about 7 fails on both machines before 2%

Test 3

clients: 16
Stream Data Rate 6MBs
Client Disk Speed: 38MBs

Conclusion: Got 2 fails in the first 2%, but 7 more fails in the next 6%. Interestingly, 7 out of the 16 started doing the recovery partition first, and as it was so quick, got onto the main image after the rest were over 2%. This might explain the packet loss. Getting a consistent 13 fails per 8%. Not sure if this works out at less then 20% or more? Seems to have failed to reimage 3 out of 16, which is good.




For the next test I wanted to see if having the images on the server itself would speed things up. I setup the repository in NetBootSP0 in /Library/Netboot/NetBootSP0

Test 4

Clients: 4
Stream Data Rate 6MBs
Client Disk Speed: 38MBs

Conclusion: 1 machine out of 4 got 20 fails before 2%, but then only got 2 more for the whole restore. Must have been a network spike or something. The others report very little (smallest so far) fails! Yay. Think I'll try and speed it up for next test.

Blender render farm for OS X in background

Hi, I want to set up a render farm at our College to run on any machine in the background with minimal installation and setup.

It looks like the built in render farm to blender is only acceptable on smaller scales where all machines are logged in, and have blender open and running. This isn't the right solution for me.

A while back I set up a render farm for Maya using OS X Qmaster. This runs in the background without anyone logged in, receives jobs and executes command line arguments. A network share is mounted on all machines running it. Looks like Qmaster isn't set up correctly on Mavericks, also might be some compatibility issues for it too. Looks like you can set up with command line:

sudo SystemStarter start Qmaster

qmasterprefs -list

Current settings:

 -sharingType servicesAndQuickCluster

 -launchContentAgent off

Bus error: 10

qmasterprefs -cluster on servername "test1"

Bus error: 10

I'm getting "Bus Error: 10" every time I run any commands

I also setup Blender to render over Xgrid, but Apple has pulled this out of the new servers so I'll give this a miss for now.

Farmerjoe render farm, looks alright. Need to install Perl I think.

DrQueue looks interesting, but you do need to compile it first.

Backburner is more promising, as we can also use it for Maya and any autodesk app. Found an article here which almost proves it. So here's my attempt a few years ago to get it working. I tried once more but couldn't get the web monitor working, might be because I've got the server app installed? Or it's mavericks? I shall continue with this.

Turn off indexing (spotlight)

Just trying to get Mavericks server working, and logged in as an Active Directory user on it. Seems mds_stores is using a large amount of processing. found this post which says to turn it off, in terminal type:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

This is the message in terminal I got when I typed the command in:

/:

Indexing disabled.

/Volumes/Scratch 1:

Indexing disabled.

/Volumes/Scratch 1/Home Folders:

Indexing disabled.

Might be to do with the fact I was trying to get home folders working, something to do with profile manager. Anyway, the command did stop the large processing.

OS X Mavericks AD failed to login because an error occurred

After updating to Mavericks 10.9.1 I seem to be having problems logging in under active directory.

Found this post which describes similar issues.

Seems my problem is now fixed. Not sure what caused it or fixed it though.