[Leica] OT: Macintosh with afterburners

[shino at panix.com (Rei Shinozuka)]

when i revised the kid's mac to put user volumes on a separate
partition, i also tried the symlink trick; i.e., make /Users a
symlink to /Volumes/Users.  but the OSX10.4 mac periodically seemed to 
forget about this symlink and occasionally rebuild a "real" (and
empty) /Users directory in the root filesystem, which you would 
have to remove and make the symlink to /Volumes/Users again.  

using netinfo to specific alternate locations for home directories was
definitely the better solution.  the only thing i noticed is that
when i ssh into the mac when no one is logged in from the console, 
is that the /Volumes partitions do not always seem to be mounted.
i never did quite figure out that one, but i don't often ssh into
the machine anyway--most recently, to do a shutdown while the kids
were refusing to stop playing games for the  night.

this mac is antithetical to yours, a Beige G3, circa 1997, hacked up
here and there with various bits of hardware to run OSX10.4, play
DVDs and run USB2, all of which postdate the machine.   illogical 
to keep a 10 year old computer on life support, but i am a sentimental
geek.  (i only recently had the heart to throw out some old sun 4 
equipment from my basement).  

-rei


On Sep06 19:40, Brian Reid wrote:
> This is utterly off topic, but I'm the barkeep here and I don't rant very 
> often.
> I just finished some risky modifications to a brand-new computer and I am 
> utterly delighted. I suspect that what I have to say here is of interest 
> only to performance freaks and computer engineers.
> 
> My daughter had a summer job working at Apple, and as a (part-time) 
> employee she was entitled to buy a small number of things at significant 
> discounts, and, further, she is explicitly allowed to buy them for 
> relatives. So I gave her some money to buy me a Mac Pro with the maximum 
> processor power that the law allows, one 500GB disk, and enough memory to 
> be bootable. Since I already had a working computer, I felt free to 
> dissect 
> it and make changes.
> 
> I found some certified Mac Pro memory for $100/GB in 2GB parts and filled 
> all 8 memory bays: 16GB of PC3500 RAM. The 2GB parts are dropping in price 
> because the 4GB parts are starting to ship (at $600/GB; no thank you!).
> 
> I also got my hands on the new Mac Pro RAID card, and 
> 3x750GB/eSATA/7200RPM 
> disks. I built a 3-disk RAID 5 array out of it, and benchmarked it to 
> drool 
> over how fast it is.
> 
> So far this is just hardware diddling. Now came the scary part. I put my 
> home directory on the RAID. I didn't want to risk making the whole system 
> run on the RAID, so boot and system functions still run on Disk0, which is 
> standalone.
> 
> The Unix sysadmin in me wanted just to make /Users/reid be a symlink, but 
> I 
> have enough scars and wounds from Mac OS that I knew it couldn't be that 
> simple. A quick remedial reading of the Netinfo Manager "documentation" 
> gave me the courage to go muck with that; changing the Netinfo resource 
> for 
> the home directory for user "reid" from /Users/reid to 
> /Volumes/HindolvestonRAID/reid" did the trick. I put in the symlink, too, 
> as an act that is partly superstition and partly "can't hurt; might help".
> 
> Shut down, restart, move all of my files to it with Retrospect, restart 
> again just for good measure, and log on.
> 
> Zooooooooooom. I've never experienced anything like it. You doubleclick a 
> big klunky application like Dreamweaver or Illustrator or InDesign and it 
> comes up before you finish blinking. The RAID card tickles all of the 
> disks, so there's a lot of very quiet disk noise for a fraction of a 
> second 
> while these applications are launching. Safari launches in an unmeasurably 
> short interval. Photoshop launches in about 4.5 seconds and opens a new 
> image in about 0.1 second. Lightroom launches in 3 seconds.
> 
> I think I can learn to live with this performance. I have to decide 
> whether 
> I'm going to be totally anal and do Retrospect backups of the RAID 5 to 
> protect against fire and earthquake and other catastrophes.
> 
> Brian Reid
> giddy with power
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Rei Shinozuka shino@panix.com
Ridgewood, New Jersey