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> Maths teaching

OS X 10.5.2 broke some stuff

2008-02-13 06:55:00

Well carp! It seems that going from 10.4.11 to 10.5.2 in one go has broken a few things on my Macbook. Most notably, my FileVault home directory refuses to mount D:

Checking things out with fsck and Disk Utility Provides the following:

Checking catalog file.

Invalid key length.

Volume check failed.

Disk verification failed.

Ouch. Luckily the encrypted sparseimage will still mount, so I'm using rsync to copy all of my data out of the home directory. Thank Dog I have an external FW disk lying around. Also thank Dog that I make a backup recently :)

Remember kids! Always make backups!

Also, it seems that the tablet driver for my Wacom Graphire4 is incompatible with 10.5.2 as well. It was working nicely with 10.5.1, but not it's borked out :( I guess I'll have to wait for an updated version.

Oh well... While my Macbook is copying all of my data, I'll go have breakfast.


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Wacom Graphire4 tablet having driver troubles in Leopard

2008-01-21 12:04:00

Ever since I upgraded my Powermac to Leopard it'd been having problems with my Wacom Graphire4 tablet. The tablet would work, but only in its very basic mode. I suspected driver issues, but couldn't figure out which driver to use.

I finally got it to work though. Here's how:

1. If you have a directory called "Pen Tablet" or "Wacom" in /Applications, go in there and run the uninstaller. Remove both the prefs and the software.

2. Go into /Library/Preferences and remove all mentions of "Wacom" or "Pen Tablet".

3. Go into /Library/Application Support and do the same.

4. Go into ~/Library/Preferences and do the same.

5. For good measure, use the Find function in Finder to search for other mentions of Wacom.

6. Download the proper driver over here.

7. Install the new driver.

It should work now :)


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iPhoto, not without its glitches

2008-01-14 09:56:00

Meh... iPhoto is not without its bugs, unfortunately. I'm busy copying a few gigs of pics from Japan to my Powermac. iPhoto keeps borking up the exports, saying that a number of files are locked due to activity. This lock appears to be taken away, once I give iPhoto the command to "revert to original" for the pics in question. It seems that the editing process in iPhoto doesn't always clean up its crap :/

This bug's changed a process that should've taken fifteen minutes into an hour's endeavour.


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Return of the Word 2004 FontCacheTool troubles

2007-11-15 19:09:00

Darn... Fighting this little bit of trouble just cost me half an hour and a good chunk of my mood.

After installing the OS X 10.4.11 update, the MS Word 2004 FontCacheTool problems I had back in 2006 arose again. Apparently this part of MS Office regularly gets into trouble with OS X's fonts and caches *grr*

I tried to get rid of the problem in a nice way by disabling any duplicate fonts and by removing the font cache. But that didn't help me any. So instead I reckoned I'd play it dirty; I didn't have time to play with Word.

$ cd /Applications/Microsoft*/Office/Support*

$ sudo mv FontCacheTool FontCacheTool.orig

Screw that piece of kit... If it doesn't want to play nicely, it won't get to play at all. Of course, that's not the proper solution. On the upside of things, Word does boot up very quickly now! ^_^;


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TruCluster: an interesting performance problem

2007-05-11 11:24:00

The past two weeks we've been having a rather mysterious problem with one of our TruClusters.

During hardware maintenance of the B-node we moved all cluster resources to the A-node to remain up and running. Afterwards we let TruCluster balance all the resources so performance would benefit again. Sounds good so far and everything kept on working like it should.

However, during some nights the A-node would slow to a crawl, not responding to any commands and inputs. We were stumped, because we simply couldn't find the cause of the problem. The system wasn't overloaded, with a low load average. The CPU load was a bit remarkable, with 10% user, 50% system and the rest in idle. The network wasn't overloaded and there was no traffic corruption. None of the disks were overloaded, with just two disks seeing moderate to heavy use. It was a mystery and we asked HP to help us out.

After some analysis they found the cause of the problem :) Part of one of the applications that was failed over to the A-node were two file systems. After the balancing of resources these file systems stuck with the A-node, while the application moved back to the B-node. So now the A-node was serving I/O to the B-node through its cluster interconnect! This also explains the high System Land CPU load, since that was the kernel serving the I/O. :D

We'll be moving the file systems back to the B-node as well and we'll see whether that solves the issues. It probably will :)


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