Category: mac

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Problem with mounting NFS on Mac OS X

Recently, I got a problem mounting my NFS shares. A shortcut to the /Volumes/Public placed on the desktop would mount the volume in read-only mode. A go to /Volumes and selecting the Public link would mount it in read-write.

Things I tried first:
-chgrp to guest, admin, 20 (group where my user is)
-chown to guest, myself, admin
-chmod to 777

Once a volume was mounted in read-only mode, it would only come back on read-write mode after a reboot of the NFS client and following the manual process. It must have been a while like this but it went unnoticed as when mounting from an application (not Finder), it would mount correctly.

I tried rebooting the QNAP (shame on me) but it would not change the mounts without rebooting the client.

So what did I learn so far. All NFS mounts are cached on the client. If you know how to clear the cache without rebooting, it would help me.

I also run nfsstat to find a lot of problems. Compared to some production systems, the number of nfs problems is abnormally high. (I will include some statistics to prove my point.)

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Alternatives to ESX(i) on Mac OS X

VMWare ESX(i) does not support Mac OS X. The hardware does not match, and the license is in conflict.

VMWare has a solution for Mac OS X that is compatible with ESX VMs under the name of Fusion. However, this is a client application and the headless mode has been disabled in its latest release. It means one has to start a client-session and in there start the server…. As such, for running a server, VMWare has no viable solution.

Leaves us with investigating other alternatives.

  • Installing ESX on a Mac PRO.
  • Installing VirtualBOX headless.
  • Installing Parallels headless.

For running Virtual BOX headless, we will need to set Virtual BOX in the launchd (yes, Mac OS X has no init.d), and figure out how to get it working on different versions. 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 seem to be slightly different.
Secondly, we will need to get RDP connections to these VMs.
Thirdle, we will need to convert back and forward machines from ESX and/or Parallels into Virtual BOX.

A good article for furhter reading.

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Snow Leopard and VM

To test a stand-alone version of Mac OS X on your machine:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=172474

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=132176&st=100

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iChat

Screen lightness setting
http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iglasses/

Issues:
http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2007/02/ichat_av_the_best_un.html

Alternatives:
Skype, http://www.sightspeed.com/