Decommissioned one of my home servers.

Since it was a nice Saturday with not much to do, I decided to decommission my oldest Mac server at my home and move its functions to another box that was newer. The oldest box (a Blue and White G3 running 10.4 Server) ran my VPN and DNS service which I didn’t want to have to rebuild, while the newer box (a Quicksilver G4) at this point was mainly acting as a Tivo media server using Tivo’s Tivo Desktop software. Since I could easily rebuild the Tivo stuff, I decided to go ahead and clone the older server’s boot drive on to the newer box’s boot drive.

This proved to be a little trickier than I’d originally thought. My original plan was to boot the newer box in Target Disk Mode, mount it as a FireWire drive, and clone directly from my old box. It was at that point that I discovered that the FireWire ports on my old box had given up the ghost at some point. I was contemplating the hassle of physically moving the drives when I remembered that I had a bootable clone drive installed in my old box. I could use ASR to make an image of the old box’s backup drive using Disk Utility, then use the disk image to image the boot drive of the newer box.

Once I had my image built, I posted it to one of my 10.5.x boxes and turned on the Apache webserver, then booted my newer box off of an OS X Server install CD. I was then able to re-image the newer box’s boot drive using Disk Utility’s ability to run a restore using an image pulled over HTTP. The imaging itself completed without a problem and the server booted itself without issues. Once it was up, I installed the Tivo Desktop software and rebuilt the Tivo media server. The effective brain transplant looks like it has been a success, which was the desired result.

Testing WordPress posting from my iPhone

I just downloaded WordPress’s iPhone app and I’m seeing how well it works to publish blog entries from my iPhone.

I’ve started finding myself using my iPhone more in situations where I would have needed my laptop before, and this may be another. If nothing else, waking my iPhone from sleep is faster.

Moved to a new home.

I’ve been futzing on and off with my home-based WordPress blog for a while now, as I started having a number of speed issues with PHP. Since WordPress offers free space, I decided to make the move over to their digs. My new address (if you’re still using the old http://www.taomechworks.net/blog address) is https://derflounder.wordpress.com