Kool Aid Served Daily

The best way to rewrite the partition table on a Mac Mini is with the OS X boot DVD. Insert it, reboot, and press C until it boots from the DVD. At that point, get to where you can start Disk Utility, then:

• Select your disk. It should be the 120G drive.
• Select partition.
• Select options
• At this point, change from GUID to MBR partition table

I also partitioned it as type Unix, but I think you can skip this as long as you get the partition table written. I couldn't figure how to eject the Tiger disk at this point. So, reboot!

At this point, your disk is hosed as far as booting. You need to get the DVD out and the best way to do that is to be pressing your mouse button while it boots. (I did the left mouse button on a Logitech mouse.) When the DVD ejects, insert your OpenSolaris DVD. I can't remember if it booted then or I had to reboot. If you need to reboot, remember to press C.

The other thing to note is that I selected the standard installation (and not the developer's installation). I partitioned the drive as follows:

0   /              20480
1   swap            4096
3   /a1            20480
4   /a2            20480
5   /zap           38632
6   ----           -----
7   /export/home   10240

/a1 and /a2 allow me to do Live Upgrades if I need to. I can also scavenge /export/home if needed (i.e., I'd have a NFS homedir server). These are mainly test machines.

And when it boots and is networked:

partition> p
Current partition table (original):
Total disk cylinders available: 14590 + 2 (reserved cylinders)

Part      Tag    Flag     Cylinders         Size            Blocks
  0       root    wm    7054 -  9664       20.00GB    (2611/0/0)   41945715
  1       swap    wu       3 -   525        4.01GB    (523/0/0)     8401995
  2     backup    wm       0 - 14589      111.77GB    (14590/0/0) 234388350
  3 unassigned    wm    4443 -  7053       20.00GB    (2611/0/0)   41945715
  4 unassigned    wm    1832 -  4442       20.00GB    (2611/0/0)   41945715
  5 unassigned    wm    9665 - 14589       37.73GB    (4925/0/0)   79120125
  6 unassigned    wm       0                0         (0/0/0)             0
  7       home    wm     526 -  1831       10.00GB    (1306/0/0)   20980890
  8       boot    wu       0 -     0        7.84MB    (1/0/0)         16065
  9 alternates    wu       1 -     2       15.69MB    (2/0/0)         32130

The IOGear KVM I have is both a lifesaver and the bane of my existence. OpenSolaris does not recognize the Apple wired keyboard under GRUB. (And it also fails to recognize it under Ubuntu.) If I use the KVM, I can use the keyboard. So that is how it is saving my life.

It is slowly killing me because of tech support. The two add-on cable clusters are not working. IOGear says it is because I am using HDMI converters on the Minis. Strangely enough, it does not matter on the embedded cable clusters. I finally found a machine in the house which has a pure VGA connection. Guess what, the cables fail to work there as well.

I'm frustrated because the tech support crew is not listening to me. They are fixated on the HDMI converters and not on the fact that the box is broken. I've just got them to admit that the thing is broken. Now I get to send them the unit and they'll send me something back, sometime.

I think I'll head over to the Apple store to see if they have anything.

I've done enough swapping of cables to be undaunted about having 3 computers and only 1 KB, mouse, and monitor. Anyway, once the systems have OpenSolaris on them, they should run smooth, right?

In Getting together a pNFS storage community I explored putting OpenSolaris on a Mac Mini. Here I'm going to talk about reversing that.

First things, the mini I am working with seems to have a screwy interaction with both my IOGear kvm and my wired Mac keyboard. The other two minis I have work fine with both.

I'm reverting back to see if I can get the machine to work with the kvm in the native OS.

Okay, pop in your installation disk - in my case it is Tiger. The first thing you will notice is that the install can not find a disk to install on to. Start Disk Utility, then:

• Select your disk. It should be the 120G drive.
• Select partition.
• Select options
• At this point, either reset to default or change from MBR to GUID partition table

And then Bob is your uncle! At this point you can change the partition to 1 huge one and select your other options. Then partition it. If you skip the steps to change to a GUID table, then this partitioning will not work. Once done, exit Disk Utility and go about a normal install.

Note, I bet I could have used Disk Utility to have avoided Ubuntu when going the other route.

We decided to get some Mac Minis as test machines for pNFS. We needed small and quiet machines.

The first problem was that the minis do not have a serial port for a console. I bought an IOGear kvm that supported 4 machines - right now I have 3. It fits right in the mini stack. The front view:

And the side view:

I know I can install Nevada 79 (the pNFS codebase is currently ontop of 79) on them - Trebor has done it - but he won't blog about it. So off I go. The first issue is that in boot up, the USB keyboard is not seen, so I have to take the default install of the developer edition. Note that I like a finer grained install which allows you to setup multiple slices. In fact, I will need that for the DS machines - they need ZFS.

Anyway, onward. Note that there are some resources for doing this with bootcamp. I want the whole disk, so I'm trying to treat this like any other x86 box.

The next hurdle is when partitioning it craps out right away with a warning that the '/' slice extends beyond HBA cylinder 1023. The nice thing about the installer is that I do not have to reboot right here. Hmm, trying a 32G root partition does the same thing. I wonder if I'm hitting the bug Paul reports in How to Dual Partition a MacBook Pro with MacOS and Solaris, e.g., CR6413235?

Nope, I bet it is the EFI issue. Okay, I asked Trebor (dark side of Robert Gordon ) if he hit this and the answer was yes. His suggestion was to let the install work until it failed, and then in the resulting terminal do fdisk -E blah, where blah for me was either 'c1d1' or 'c1d1p0'. Both gave the same output for me.

I still selected a 40G partition because I want to have a ZFS partition on the rest of the disk. And now the installation is just proceeding. And it dies trying to install the boot blocks. This was after installing everything.

I'm trying Ubuntu right now to get a different perspective. It also had an issue with the keyboard at first. Note that I can reconfigure the nevada ISO to boot grub up into the regular install if needed.

Anyway, the Ubuntu install is chugging away. It is done and appears to start to reboot. Very slow compared to OS X. And it is networked!

Now I want to see what happens when I install Nevada (snv 79) on top of Ubuntu. The first difference is that I do not get that annoying '/' 1023 cylinder message. Umm! And that works!

Okay, I want to avoid the booting Ubuntu step in the future. I'm pretty sure the problems I am seeing are with the disk label. I guess I really need to pay attention to steps 6-9 of Alan Perry's Setting up a Mac Mini for dual booting Solaris and MacOS X - note that neither Alan or Paul had problems with their keyboards. Paul wouldn't on a laptop. And Alan may have been doing this before the Developer installation was an option.

To get networking going, you need a Marvell Yuokon driver, which you can get from this entry: Solaris 10 U3 on Gateway MX6453 - be sure to follow the advice to get the 64 bit version. And note, it downloaded as skgesol_x64v8.19.1.3.tar.Z.tar for me, so rename it to get rid of the trailing '.tar'.

Read that blog entry again, I needed to add to my '/etc/driver_aliases':

skge "pci11ab,4362"

Okay, I'll continue this later...

So not all wiki markup languages are the same. The Wikka markup does not match that of MediaWiki. So Robert suggested The MacPorts Project. And port and I are old friends from FreeBSD. Anyway, the php install did not like that Leopard is now using apache2. I got past that with help from php-5.2.5 on Leopard. Note I did the following:

sudo port install php5 +apache2 +mysql5 +pear +sqlite

Now to configure MediaWiki. Umm, where is that config directory? Why here at file:///opt/local/www/data/mediawiki/config. You are supposed to be able to just load file:///opt/local/www/data/mediawiki and it detects that you need to configure it. Okay, manaually loading either results in gibberish.

Manual:Installing MediaWiki tells you how to configure MySQL for MediaWiki. And that actually results in a good initial screen. But the path is all wrong. According to the manual, this http://localhost/wiki should just work. Okay, do the following:

stealth:www tdh$ cd /opt/local/apache2/
stealth:htdocs tdh$ sudo ln -s /opt/local/www/data/mediawiki wiki

My guess is that the change from apache to apache2 has changed where things are installed. Note you can move the directory, but if you do an upgrade, then you are hosed.

Make sure you realize when you setup the MySQL part you are creating a password of 'password' for wikiuser. You can fix that mistake, if you somehow did it, not saying I did:

stealth:htdocs tdh$ mysql -u wikiuser -p
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 12
Server version: 5.0.45 MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> set password = password("change_me");
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> \q
Bye

And you still need to fix up the socket for MySQL and PHP to talk:

stealth:etc tdh$ pwd
/opt/local/etc
stealth:etc tdh$ diff php.ini php.ini-recommended 
810,811c810
< ; mysql.default_socket =
< mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
---
> mysql.default_socket =

I wanted a wiki on my Mac Mini - why? I forget. I found that Installing Wikka Wiki on Mac OS X seemed to be popular. And it doesn't take into account Leopard.

The docs mainly work. The first thing you need to do when installing php is make the change to uncomment this:

stealth:apache2 tdh$ pwd
/private/etc/apache2
stealth:apache2 tdh$ grep php httpd.conf 
LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

I'm using a Terminal shell.

And before you can start viewing private web pages, you need to not only turn on 'System Preferences' -> 'Sharing' -> 'Web Sharing', you need to add the following:

stealth:users tdh$ pwd
/private/etc/apache2/users
stealth:users tdh$ more local.conf 
#
# Allow access to all users' Sites directory for web clients.
#
<Directory "/Users/*/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Okay, you need to restart apache!

stealth:sbin tdh$ sudo apachectl restart
stealth:sbin tdh$ 

And when you install MySQL, you need to create a db and some permissions:

stealth:sbin tdh$ sudo mysql -u root -p 
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 4
Server version: 5.0.45 MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> 

Note that you can do a 'sudo w' before this to make sure you have a cached password for 'sudo'. The password you want to give here is the one for the 'root' account in the database.

Create a database and an admin:

mysql> create database wakki;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wakki.* to 'wakki'@'localhost'
    -> IDENTIFIED BY 'change_me' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wakki.* to 'wakki'@'%'
    -> IDENTIFIED BY 'change_me' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> exit;
Bye
stealth:sbin tdh$ 

Note, I am not a MySQL expert or even a database expert. I just adapted what I found at 5.5.2. Adding New User Accounts to MySQL.

Okay, now try to load the webpage for the configuration. It will ask you questions and eventually when you tell it to Connect, it will tell you it was not able to verify the connection. The issue is that the stock php from Apple does not communicate in the same place as the MySQL. You can configure this as:

stealth:etc tdh$ diff php.ini.default php.ini
760c760
< mysql.default_socket =
---
> mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

And then restart apache.

Note, I had to reboot. I don't know what wasn't reloading, it may have been the difference between '/private/tmp' and '/private':

stealth:etc tdh$ ls -la /tmp/mysql.sock 
srwxrwxrwx  1 _mysql  wheel  0 Dec 17 22:51 /tmp/mysql.sock
stealth:etc tdh$ ls -la /private/tmp/mysql.sock 
srwxrwxrwx  1 _mysql  wheel  0 Dec 17 22:51 /private/tmp/mysql.sock

I guess that change should really be to '/private/tmp/mysql.sock'.

Oh, and the form loaded correctly now.

Got a brand new Mac mini - plugged it in and played with it. Then I realized that it had no sound. Even the inner speaker was grayed out. Adding an external speaker did not help. And a quick google did not help.

I went to the Apple Mac mini support forums Apple.com - Support - Discussions - Mac mini and I found a plausible theory in Not getting any sound -.

CDW had opened the mini to upgrade the memory for me. Once I learned how to open it up, I did so and found this ribbon cable loose:

Upon connecting it:

I ran a quick test with the cover off and discovered I had fixed the problem. Also, note that taking the cover on and off gets easier with practice.