Sad (tech) day at the Gruby house

We've been using a Mac Mini as a media center for a little while now and haven't used the TiVo in weeks. So, today, I decided to unplug the TiVo. The TiVo has been our friend for over 5 years and has undergone a few surgeries to swap out the hard drive.

When I unplugged the TiVo, I said to my wife, "notice how quiet it is?". She hadn't noticed the noise as it has been background noise for so long. The hard drive in it and the fan were quite noisy. The difference is absolutely amazing in terms how quiet it is now in our TV room.

While the TiVo has served us well, it is looking like my Mac Mini with EyeTV is going to fit the bill for our TV watching needs. The solution is not perfect, but it is working well.

RIP, TiVO.

Open Directory and DNS

As I've written before, Open Directory on Mac OS X doesn't like it when DNS is messed up. It requires forward and reverse DNS to point to the same place. Our Open Directory server was running fine, but today we moved DNS to a different machine.

I was unable to authenticate using LDAP and saw an error in the LDAP log:

Miscellaneous failure No principal in keytab matches desired name.

After a little searching, I can across a blog entry mentioning this and talking about DNS. While it wasn't exactly what I had, it made me do a little poking at my system. Turns out that I created 3 A records for the LDAP server which created a reverse DNS entry for the server. The problem is that the forward DNS entry didn't match the reverse DNS entry. I changed 2 of the A records to CNAME records, restarted the LDAP server and the problem went away.

I wonder if there is another cause for this problem or just the authors of the software didn't bother to put in a useful error message. It's easy to ignore putting in useful error messages when writing code, but when Apple decides to use open source software and slap a GUI on it, they should try to make the error messages more useful. Again, I'm complaining about slapping a GUI on command line applications. If I wasn't persistent and didn't know how to troubleshoot UNIX, I'd never be able to run a Mac OS X server.

How (not) to install a dishwasher

The below steps are what I did to replace our ailing dishwasher. They should NOT be followed by anyone and your dishwasher should be installed by a professional. However, please note that the $100 install charge that Home Depot and Lowes charges may not cover your install if something is not simple.

1. Shut off water supply to dishwasher.
2. Shut off circuit breaker to dishwasher.
3. Figure out how to remove cabinet kick plate. This proved to be challenging because tile was put in after the cabinetry and dishwasher was installed>.
4. Disconnect water supply from dishwasher.
5. Carefully open box with power supply.
6. Unscrew wirenuts and use test meter to verify that power is off.
7. Attempt to pull dishwasher out.
8. Realize that dishwasher is too tall because tile was put in after dishwasher was put in.
9. Try to lower feet by hand, but it doesn't work.
10. Grab pliers and screw in feet.
11. Pull out dishwasher.
12. Disconnect drain line.
13. Put dishwasher aside.
14. Notice extra wires in the back with a wirenut only on the hot.
15. Put wirenut on the neutral (just because).
16. Push wires back into hole in wall.
17. Notice that wires seem like they're going to break.
18. Take off wirenuts and test wires.
19. See that no current is flowing.
20. Cut wires below where it looked like it was going to break.
21. Thank goodness that I was using rubber handled cutters.
22. Wait for heart to stop racing.
23. Think about how on this green earth was I going to cap this live wire without shutting off power to the whole house.
24. Put on leather gloves.
25. Put test meter on newly exposed wires and see that they are live.
26. Realize that the reason that the meter initially said there was no current was because the wires were broken.
27. Shut off circuit breakers and retest wires.
28. Carefully finish cutting the wires.
29. Carefully strip the wires and apply wirenuts.
30. Push wires back in wall.
31. Turn breaker for that circuit back on.
32. Call it a day.
33. Wait for dishwasher to arrive.
34. See that hole for drain line and supply line wasn't big enough.
35. Use recipricating saw to make hole bigger.
36. When saw doesn't finish the job, grab Dremel and work on the hole.
37. Attach supply line to water line and feed it through the hole.
38. Feed drain hose through hole (it's attached to the dishwasher).
39. Put supply line in channel under dishwasher.
40. Screw right angle connector onto dishwasher for water supply line after putting Teflon tape on it.
41. Think that the direction the right angle connector ended up could be a problem later.
42. Push dishwasher into hole.
43. See that power doesn't come through the channel like it should have.
44. Attempt to pull dishwasher back out and see it get stuck.
45. Spend awhile trying to yank the dishwasher out and figuring out what to do.
46. Grab plastic drywall knife and jam it into the side to try to get dishwasher out.
47. Pull dishwasher out.
48. Grab Dremel and make modifications to cabinet.
49. Attach lead wire to power cable with electrical tape to help feed it.
50. Push dishwasher back in cabinet.
51. Yank on wire for power.
52. See feed wire come off.
53. Pull dishwasher out.
54. Tie feed wire to power and re-tape it.
55. Push dishwasher back in.
56. Connect water supply line.
57. Turn on water supply line.
58. See water leak at supply line side of right angle connector.
59. Turn off water supply.
60. Redo Teflon tape and re-attach water supply line.
61. Turn water back on.
62. Wait a few minutes.
63. See water leak on other side of right angle connector.
64. Shut off water supply.
65. Unscrew water supply line.
66. Unscrew right angle connector.
67. Reapply Teflon tape on right angle connector.
68. Reattach right angle connector.
69. Reapply Teflin tape on right angle connector on supply line side.
70. Reattach water supply line.
71. Turn on water.
72. See that water didn't leak.
73. Connect power supply with wirenuts.
74. Attach drain hose to airgap.
75. Attempt to level front feet.
76. Directions say to use 1/4" ratchet to screw down feet.
77. See that my socket fits, but the wrench doesn't physically fit no matter what I did.
78. Look all around for something to lower the feet.
79. Find Gerber multitool in garage.
80. As a last ditch effort, use tool to lower feet. The big issue was the tile made it difficult to get access to the feet.
81. Finish leveling dishwasher.
82. Secure top brackets of dishwasher.
83. Attempt to put cabinet kick plate back.
84. Struggle with it.
85. Make cutout for dishwasher bigger.
86. Try to put it back; still didn't work.
87. Excess grout was causing it not to fit.
88. Chip out some grout with a screwdriver.
89. Use Dremel to grind down some grout.
90. Push kick plate back in and put in a nail (one seems to hold it).
91. Turn on circuit breaker, cross fingers.
92. Test dishwasher.
93. Cleanup. (This took awhile as I made a complete mess out of the kitchen.)
94. Relax and pat yourself on the back.

As you can see, this experience was not easy and if I had to do it again, I probably would have just spent the money to have someone else do it (I think I always say that, but come back to thinking that I can do anything around the house).

Another fight with OS X Server

It seems that every few weeks, I have another fight with OS X server. I still run Leopard Server as most of our Xserves are PPC and won't run Snow Leopard, so these issues may have been addressed. I was moving our wiki and our sites from one server to another and that's where the fun started. It appeared that the setting for where the wiki would be located wouldn't stick. There appeared to be an issue with LDAP.

When I was touching the Web settings, I saw error messages in the log like was reported here

May 27 20:17:22 server servermgrd52: servermgr_web: htcleancache disabled
May 27 20:17:22 server servermgrd52: *** -WPWebServices updateWebServices:withVirtualHosts:withSession:: Couldn't update the WebServices record in /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1. Reason: Unable to set value(s) for dsAttrTypeNative:apple-serviceinfo in record $.
May 27 20:17:22 server servermgrd52: servermgr_web: Failure saving group services update: (null)
May 27 20:17:22 server servermgrd52: servermgr_web: Multi instance key 'SSLLog' has a single value=''!
May 27 20:17:22: --- last message repeated 2 times ---

(I was so frustrated, I didn't copy the error messages, so what you see above is from the link referenced above.)

I gave up on this the other day and hacked on LDAP to get things working, but today I had to revisit it. I was starting to wind down my work day today when I had a stroke of genius; the error message referenced a host that I thought I had changed (I thought that when the LDAP server was setup, forward and reverse DNS were setup as those are critical to Open Directory working). I remembered one reference to the old hostname in Workgroup Manager. I went in Workgroup Manager, clicked on the computer tab, selected the old hostname, and changed the name to the real name, saved the entry, restarted servermgrd and presto, the error went away! Yeah!

I might give Snow Leopard server a test drive, but as long as Apple wraps command line tools up with a GUI, there are going to be problems. There is no way that they can handle all possible issues

If this solution helps you and saves you time (I think I spent a full day fighting with this), please purchase something through the Amazon link.