Tom Morris

Why I hate UNIX and OS X (occasionally)

I was woken this morning with “the Mac isn’t working”. I crawl out of bed and start reading /var/log/system.log. I find lots of gnarly shit. I figure that this machine has been through a lot of upgrades - including the major system upgrades of 10.4-to-10.5 and 10.5-to-10.6. Since Google was giving me no helpful responses to the various aforementioned bits of gnarly shit in system.log, I decide it’s time to do a full backup, wipe and reinstall 10.6 from the DVD.

I’m about half way through the rsync process. I’ve so far had only one problem with the rsync itself - the rsync process gets stuck reading files in LyX’s Application Support folder - the OS X equivalent of .lyx - LyX-1.5 or whatever. It’s all files which get recreated automatically by the software on use anyway, so I zap ‘em with the rm stick and rsync gets on with it.

But before I got started with rsync, I do a bit of Googling about OS X backups, wondering whether or not I should use Time Machine for this backup rather than rsync. And, yes, I know that the machine is supposed to be backed up with Time Machine anyway, but I’ve had so many stupid arguments about this with certain - ahem - well, luser wouldn’t be the right word for family. You know. When I tell them that if we had proper full-disc backups, life would be a lot easier, they don’t believe me. Until days like today - the reason you can’t read your e-mail today is because you didn’t listen to me six months ago. As jwz says Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.. Being right so often gets dull when people don’t listen.

As I was saying, I was Googling wondering whether I should use rsync or cp -r or asr or ditto or whatever. And I run across Command Line Backup Solutions on Mac OS X from those ever helpful folks at Apple Developer Connection. A few paragraphs in and with confirmation from the nice people at Apple - albeit circa. 2005 - that I’m doing it right, I read on to the “Caveats” section, where I find this:

For example, the fink software installer installs a new copy of tar (in /sw/bin) which does not handle resource forks, even though the one distributed with Mac OS X does. Be sure you know exactly which program you’re specifying.

An OS X package manager that installs it’s own version of tar because it doesn’t like Mean Uncle Steve’s version? Gee, I never saw that one coming. Good thing I use MacPorts. It’d never do anything like that! It’ll just take six fucking hours to install git because it wants to compile Perl - no, not the Perl that comes pre-installed, but the slightly older version that they have in MacPorts instead. I did say compile. Yeah, the Gentoo crowd is calling and wants the go-faster stripes back.

And what do you know, it’s 3am, I can’t sleep and I’m fussing with rsync crap. Days like today, I really hate computers. And though I’m glad I’m not doing the same thing on Windows, I still get enraged at UNIX, BSD and Mac.

Cloud computing is stupid: basic economics edition

As I’ve said repeatedly, UbuntuOne is one of the main reasons I’m moving anything Ubuntu-based that I own to Debian - I would rather have my Linux distro built by hackers for hackers than by Canonical for Windows numpties. My operating system doesn’t need a “cloud computing strategy”. Cloud computing is just computers connected to the Internet - Larry Ellison is completely right about that.

Given that premise, if you have minimal knowledge of Linux host administration, and you have a use case similar to mine, you’ll find cloud computing to be economically ridiculous. Here are the sums:

UbuntuOne costs 120 USD per year - 71 GBP - gets you 50Gb of storage on a server. Or if you prefer to talk like a venture capitalist, it gets you 50Gb in the cloud.

According to Overclockers.co.uk, a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA-II drive with 32MB cache costs 62.99 GBP. If you put one of these inside your desktop PC, install Debian (or your preferred non-numptie distribution) and install ssh/scp/sftp, rsync, Apache and any other services you use, you can now get access to that storage from anywhere, but also get access to the computing resources of your computer from anywhere. If you need to run an application, you write it, put it into a tarball, scp the tarball onto the machine, then untar it, compile it and run it.

If you desperately want to make yourself sound like an idiot, you can call this ‘the private cloud’. Personally, I call it having a computer connected to the Internet.

UbuntuOne gives you 50GB of storage. My ‘put a hard drive inside a computer connected to the Internet’ plan gives you 1TB. And that’s 1TB of storage hosted in the country you live in, and thus subject to your laws, not the laws of the US or France or Japan or wherever the fuck the ‘cloud’ happens to be located (surely, if it’s a cloud, it could hover over international waters?). You can use super-strong encryption on that data and on the transmission of that data between computers.

If you own a laptop, you can sync your data with the other computer extremely quickly, since it’s on the local area network as well as on ‘the cloud’. And you don’t need to have the UbuntuOne cloud software installed. Just ssh, rsync etc.

As you can see, cloud computing is a compelling vision of the future. Buy now.