Mac Pan!

[jsbowden]

I have to admin some OS X boxes these days, so I bought a Mac to put next to my desk at work.

It joins the SGI Fuel R16000/800 running Irix 6.5.28m and and will soon have a Dell box running RedHat EL 4 joining the party. And on my desk is my Dell D800 with WinXP Pro and FreeBSD 5-Stable in dual boot configuration. I am OS man, hear me roar. Usually in anger. At the assholes who write operating systems. But I regress. Or was it repress? Oh wait, digress, that was it.

So far, it's a nice little machine :

[vampire:~] jamie% uname -a
Darwin vampire.photon.com 7.9.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.9.0: Wed Mar 30 20:11:17 PST 2005; root:xnu/xnu-517.12.7.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

Dual 1.8Ghz G5 with 768MB RAM and 80GB SATA HDD. Optical drive is a Pioneer DVR [A|1]08 DVD+/-RW rebranded as an Apple Superdrive, which is a nice drive in any machine.

It's running Mac OS 10.3.9 currently, but 10.4 is on the way.

I'm going to have to buy a book. Apple has nicely provided the Unix underpinnings, but the machine is definately not Unix. Things do not work like I expect. I like OS X from a user perspective, but why the hell do you set the hostname under sharing settings instead of under network settings as is, for everyone but Apple, normal? Setting up a printer involved digging around in the Finder until I located the printer setup utility. Nowhere in the system settings panel is there a place to set up printers? Why the fuck not? The annoyances are minor, but they are adding up. I can see now that administering OS X is not going to be anywhere near as nice as using it. Shame really.

Comments

[nubule.livejournal.com]

I’m not at home now and am therefore unable to check, but I’m nearly certain “Print & Fax” or somesuch is one of the sections of System Preferences.

With 10.4 you’d have been able to type “print” into the Spotlight field to find it.

I agree about the dumbness of locating the host name under Sharing. In 10.4, though, the aforementioned Spotlight means you don’t have to dig around to find anything.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Amazingly enough, it was right there in front of me in the system settings panel. I must be going blind as I get older.

I'll get used to it eventually, I just have to acclimate myself to the Apple way of Sucking Different (because ALL OS's suck.)

[sungo.livejournal.com]

i've got me some super duper osx brain knowings so if you've got questions, i've got drool on my chin. (oh wait i don't work at compussr). i mean, i've got answers. :)

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Nah, I'll find a nice book. I bet O'Reilly makes one, and you can never have too many ORA books on the shelf.

[sungo.livejournal.com]

fine then. be that way :) i'm told Mac OS X Hacks is a good title. Not quite on the sysad level but it should have some general hacks on making the osx experience suck less.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I have to be that way, it's my job to know this stuff. I put a box under my desk specificly so I could break it in interesting ways and beat my head against the wall trying to fix it, but first is getting familiar with it.

[nubule.livejournal.com]

Also. I’ve never seriously administered Macs, have you been provided with adequate software? Remote Desktop seems useful, though I’ve only used it for VNC-esque features.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

More like RDP for Windows, and I found that already. I'm not sure it'll be useful, as I have a pretty nifty 4 port KVM switch on my desk.