The SINZIG.NET Blog

Problem:

You've configured a VPN to your office using PPTP (for Microsoft VPN) and it connects ok but doesn't route the traffic properly. Meaning you can't access any remote computers unless you tick the "Send all traffic over VPN connection" box. This however is not what you want. You don't want your internet traffic going via the VPN but if you don't tick this particular option it simply doesn't work.

Here's why:

IPv6. That's right. All you have to do is disable IPv6 in both your Ethernet Connection and the VPN settings. To do so, just select the TCP/IP tag and set "Configure IPv6" to OFF.

Voila, just by magic, everything works.

After extensive testing and upgrading to Snow Leopard 10.6.1, the HighPoint RocketRaid 3510 has lived up to my expectations. It just sits there in the background working away without any problems and when it comes to speed, it certainly cuts the mustard compared to the original Apple RaidCard I used to have.

Here are the results using QuickBench 4:

XBench 1.8:

That makes for one very happy camper! :-)

I've decided to ditch my Apple Raid Card and buy a decent controller from a mob who understands what they're doing. I did a lot of reading and found a series of controllers that not only work on Macs but also allow you to boot from drives attached to them. This is important for me as I want to boot from my SSD Raid. I decided to settle for a controller that can handle 4 drives without the need for external connectivity.

The best choice for me was the RocketRaid 3510. It has been tested on barefeats.com and produced great results with SSD disks. It only provides one internal channel which is exactly what I need. Check it out on the HighPoint website.

After ordering the HighPoint RocketRaid 3510, I thought about my options when it comes to connecting the drives. There are several ways to do it and I decided to keep the drives in the 4 bays and use the iPass cable that runs from the main board to the back panel of the drives. The only problem is that this cable isnt' long enough. It just barely fits onto the Apple Raid Card which is a full length card. My RocketRaid card is much smaller and the only way to make it happen is to use the extension cable provided by maxupgrade.com. These guys have all sorts of nice tools, so check out their website.

I ordered the following cable:

Now you need to be aware, that this only works for MacPros older than 2009. The latest models don't have the same layout anymore and there is no iPass cable running from the main board to the drives. The guys at maxupgrade have a solution for the 2009 series, too. But that's for somebody else to report on. You can read about it on barefeats.com at the bottom of this report.

To put the SSD drives into the bay slots, I also ordered these neat looking frames from the same mob:

They fit perfectly and slide into the drive bay, connecting the 2.5" SSDs to the SATA back panel.

Having ordered 3 G.SKILL SSDs, I've decided to put one into my 17" Mac Book Pro. It's a 4th Generation model. Not the latest one but still very much up to it. I figured, the MBP could benefit greatly from a fast SSD so I went ahead and removed about 15 million screws to get to the disk inside the MBP. It's not a big deal to do so but it takes a bit of time and can probably be a bit intimidating if you never tried anything like that before. But fear not, there are great step by step instructions on how to open a MBP. One can be found here:

Do yourself a BIG favour and get a torx screwdriver before you start. It's well worth the money.

What else should you know before you order your SSD?

I have a 4,1 series:

The "problem" with this version is that it only supports SATA 1.5 instead of SATA 3.0. In other words, you only get half the speed. This is something that nobody quite understands since the Intel ICH8-M inside the MBP is perfectly capable of SATA 3.0. It is therefore some sort of limitation that Apple has put in place. There are quite a lot of forums, blogs and reports out there but there doesn't seem to be a trick to reactivate the faster speed.

So you could save yourself some time and just buy the cheapest SSD you can find out there. No need to squeeze the last bit of performance out of it as the controller itself won't be able to handle it.

Enough said. Rest assured that the performance gain you get by installing an SSD in a MacBook Pro is well worth every penny, regardless of the limits introduced by the controller. It is just simply fantastic!

QuickBench 4 is reporting the following speed:

But just how much quicker is it to work with? That would be something only you can answer. Everybody is different in what they do with their MBP. I use it a lot at customer sites with many different apps and everything is basically responding instantly. For example:

Opening itunes takes somewhere between 2 and 4 seconds. iphoto opens in around 3 seconds. Things that took FOREVER to open previously, such as Apple's Pages and Numbers, now pop up under 2 seconds. If you do work with Java Apps, the news is just as good. For example, SAP GUI for Java is ready in just over 4 seconds.

It is just a pleasure to work on my MBP. One of the greatest advantages of SSD is that you don't have to worry about a disk head crash since there is no head to start with. :-)

You just close the lid and walk away with your MBP under your arm. Who cares if it is still in the process of falling asleep? If you ever have to rush from your desk into a meeting room for a presentation on your MBP, just grab it and you're on your way. I very much appreciate these small but significant benefits.

I'm not sure about this, but I disabled the Sudden Motion Sensor. I can't see the point of it with an SSD. If somebody has a different view or some arguments against turning it off, please let me know.

To sum it up, you have to see it for yourself to appreciate the difference. It is just simply unbelievable. Get yourself an SSD. You won't regret it!

After months of reading and counting money, I've decided to replace the disks in my first generation MAC PRO (3Ghz Model Identifier MacPro2,1) . I have been using the Apple Raid card with 4 1TB Samsung SATA drives and while the Apple Raid Card never really performed very well, I also never really thought much about it. It was more or less an install and forget type of thing. This time however, things would be different. The SSDs are capable of reaching transfer rates that would require a fast RAID Controller.

Now the Apple Raid Card has been bagged by more than one review out there. It is basically pretty useless and limits data transfer to 320MB/s. Barefeat has many reviews and comparisons on their website. One comprehensive test can be found here:

So what did I test? First, following some common sense, I installed the 2 SSDs in a RAID0. Then I used a single SSD just to compare the performance, followed by removing the Apple Raid Card altogether, using only the internal standard controller and a software based Raid 0. The results are crazy. The Apple Raid card is actually slower than the internal controller in a software based RAID0 configuration. Sure, it is probably all about redundancy and the Raid Card has been good in this regard. But it cost me more than $1000. That's a bit rich for something that doesn't perform at all.

You may think something went wrong and clearly a hardware based raid should outperform a software based solution, but I'm not the only one with these findings. Barefeats again run the same test on the brand new MacPro with the BRAND NEW Apple Raid card and the results are less than flattering once again. Apple just doesn't seem to be able to create a decent Raid controller.

The software based Raid0 results on Barefeat are here:

Here are my test results on XBench 1.8:

I just got a copy of QuickBench 4 and did some testing on the software raid0 configuration. ( I didn't have QuickBench before, so no data for the hardware Raid for now.)

These figures are quite good. But I want my hardware based Raid back. It is after all more reliable and in a perfect world also quicker than the software Raid. After a lot of reading and thinking, I have ordered a HighPoint RocketRaid 3510 for my SSD setup. It will arrive soon. So expect more tests and hopefully a further increase in performance, too. (I can't quite see how this would be possible but I need the controller anyway.)

The HighPoint RocketRaid 3510 has been tested by Barefeats and the results have been impressive indeed with 4 SSD drives. You can see the results here:

So, the Apple Raid card will be on eBay soon, making room for the HighPoint RocketRaid 3510.

Over the last few weeks and months, spam has become an overwhelming problem. There are default settings that come with OSX Server but they won't get you the results you need. There are still way too many spam messages finding their way into the inbox.

There is a "new" approach called postgrey. So what is it? Firstly, it was created by  David Schweikert. It works as a Postfix policy server and it creates a greylist instead of a white or black list. A blacklist is a way to reject mail and  whitelist is a way to allow mail into your system. A greylist however works differently. Greylists are pure gold when it comes to rejecting junk email. Whenever a client attempts to send mail to a particular recipient, the greylist server will attempt to find that client’s address and the recipient’s address in its database. If there is no such entry then one will be created, and Postfix will use a standard SMTP error message to tell the client that the recipient’s mailbox is temporarily unavailable and to try again later. It will then continue to reject similar attempts until the timestamp is of a certain age (default is five minutes). The theory behind this is that almost no special-purpose spam sending software will actually attempt to
re-send the message, but almost every legitimate mail server in existence will gladly comply and send the queued message a short time later. 

A few things you need to get started on your OSX Server box:

• Install the developer tools. You need a C compiler and the tools will provide you with one. You can find it on your Server DVD or download the latest and greatest version at developer.apple.com
• Download Darwinports and follow the instructions on their webpage to install it.
• Install postgrey by following these instructions.
• run this command to launch postgrey at startup:  sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.postgrey.plist
• Add this string to your main.cf file under the smtpd_recipient_restrictions section, right  at the end:  check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:60000

Just when you thought it couldn't possibly get any more complicated, there's this:

As of 2009, SAP requires Maintenance Certificates for all 7.0 and higher based systems for Support Pack installations.

These maintenance certificates can be obtained automatically via your Solution Manager or manually via transaction SLICENSE. SAP created a special license key of type "Maintenance", which is typically valid for 3 months. It can be obtained in the Service Marketplace and then installed via SLICENSE.

• SAP suspects a lot of companies are using SAP without proper contracts or even without a valid license.
• The new digital license apparently can't be hacked as it is encrypted with a 128bit key.

So, you may be one of those lucky ones having more than one MAC at your disposal. You may even have Compressor installed. This handy application comes with Final Cut Pro and it allows you to convert your movies into all sorts of formats using batch processing. To make things more interesting, Apple has thrown in Qmaster. This great tool allows you to build clusters. That's right! Why not put those CPU cycles inside your mighty Macs on your network to good use? 

According to our good friends at Apple, that's a piece of cake. Thanks to quick cluster, you can set a cluster up in just about no time at all. This blog isn't going to tell you how to do it. Because I assume that you've already done it only to find out that it doesn't work properly. Then you did what everybody else would do. You went on to Google to search for the answer. Which is most likely why you ended up here... So lets cut to the chase. 

You built your quick cluster, you started the services and now you're trying to submit a batch job. The only thing that happens afterwards is that Compressor seems to be hanging. The beach ball is spinning and nothing else is happening. After a few seconds or even minutes, you will get an error message saying something like "ContentAgent server not found". No matter what you do, no matter how many times you reinstall Compressor, the error just keeps popping up. 

Here's why:

You've enabled "Back to my Mac" in your mobile me preference panel. That's right... It's got nothing to do with Compressor, Qmaster or FCP or anything else. The only reason why it doesn't work is because of this little, most annoying setting. Go figure... It took me several days to solve that one.

 

Now I'm happily using Compressor to convert all my movies to Apple TV, iPhone and Touch in one go and boy, how great is it to use a cluster! Things are just flying! I have to say it's most impressive to see an 8core MacPro and a 4core G5 PowerMac hard at work. I even throw in my Macbook Pro to spice things up a bit!