Mac Pro – the final upgrade

Today I have received the last piece for my Mac Pro upgrade. Below you can see the box with Fully Buffered ECC RAM – each is 4GB in size:

I already had 12 GB RAM built in upgraded it to 26 now (I had to leave 2 GB out, because the Riser cards have only 8 slots available):

The workstation which virtualizes a complete Lab now has 26 GB available to perform nicely.

Additionally I have configured the Workstation with enough power to do its virtualization:

• CPU: 8 core Xeon 3GHz ( 2 x Quad core)
• RAM: 26 GB high performance FB DIMM ECC
• Disk 1: System drive: SSD Intel 160 GB (only for host OS)
• RAID: High performance SATA RAID with 3 x 2 TByte disks (7200) for Virtual machines
• Ethernet: 2 x 1 GBit/s Ethernet connected to a Cisco Switch

It took me a few days to complete the complete setup with VLANs, OSs and additional configuration. But it looks good now

Why the eSATA port?

I had to transfer around 3 TByte of data from one external RAID to another. Both have been connected at the only FireWire 800 port in a daisy chain configuration. The transfer took more than 24 hours due to the fact that the 800 MBit/s the port could handle is cut into half the speed shared between both RAID systems. The 800 MBit/s are unrealistic and optimally I got around 80 MByte/s which is around 640 MBit/s. Over the full 3 TBytes I had an average of 34 MBytes/s per device.

This painful situation brought me to the idea of using the Optical SATA port to connect one of the Lacie 4big devices.

Coverting the Mac mini Slimline Port to Standard SATA

The first step is to convert the optical connector (slimline), which is slightly different to a standard SATA port. To get this done, I used a converter cable like the one in the second picture. There’s a how-to available at ifixit.com how to create such a cable.

The slimline connector looks like this:

The cable from the other side needs to be connected like this:

Converting the SATA connector to a eSATA port

I wanted to be able to have a real eSATA port on the backside of the Mac mini. To make this possible, I had to cut (actually mold) a hole into the backside plastic and let the standard SATA cable look to the outside.

To be able to close the case again, I also cut off the security cable connector. Once the case is closed I only needed to get the right adapter to change the SATA male port to a female eSATA port. The connector I used is the following:

InLine®, eSATA female to SATA female

The completed eSATA modification looks like this:

Transfer speeds connected via eSATA

The top speed is more than 120 MB/s, from FireWire 800 to eSATA I have more than 80 MBytes/s, which is more than double the speed I had before.

Here’s a screenshot of the LaCie 4big quadra connected via eSATA to the Mac mini:

Just a short comment about my re-installation of the primary Mac OS X 10.6 Server:

After the 10.6.5 software update I had major issues and restored the Open Directory database. This wasn’t the most intelligent idea I’ve done. After that, my whole system was so in-stable that I decided to re-create my Server from scratch.

While every important data is on the external Mass Storage Unit anyway the only headache was the OpenDirectory. It is easy to export users, groups and machine objects but not the passwords and EUIDs.

Finally after 16 hours of work (during the night), I could restore the system and it is in a better shape than ever before.

Hint: if you ever want to have a safe OpenDirectory – purchase a second server and sync the accounts. Anything else is just too much hassle.

Initial Setup:

Before I get to the results of the ATI Radeon HD 5770 and the 27″ LED Cinema Display here are my full specs I had initially:

Hardware:

• Mac Pro 2,1 (8-core) with 8 x 3 GHz CPUs Intel Xeon 5300 series
• ATI Radeon X1900 XT
• 12 GB RAM
• 23″ Cinema Display connected to first DVI port
• 27″ LED Cinema Display connected to second DVI port using a Mini Display Port converter (Atlona DP400)

Software:

• Mac OS X 10.6.4 (10F569)

When I received the 27″ LED Cinema Display and the Atlona DP400 I couldn’t get it working with 10.6.4 (see previous article). With the 10.6.5 developer preview it was working right after the first reboot (even with two screens attached to the DVI ports).

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My Mac Pro 2,1 (early 2007) currently has a PCIe ATI Radeon X1900 video card – the same like the one built into the MacPro 1,1. Due to the fact that I bought a Apple 27″ LED Cinema Display a couple of days ago, I needed a translation between the Mini Display Port and the DVI ports of the graphics card.

I also bought the Atlona DP400 (http://www.atlona.com/Atlona-Dual-Link-DVI-to-Mini-DisplayPort-Converter-USB-Powered.html) which should convert the DVI signal to MDP. This is working quite well if you do not activate “Overscan” which blows up the picture on the screen to the full size at 2560×1440 pixels. While this did not work, I have ordered a ATI Radeon HD 5770 upgrade today.

Once I have it at hand, I will describe how this card is working on the “old” Mac Pro including additional monitors on the other ports. Most probably on Saturday you’ll read more about my experiences.

I am very positive that it’ll work – especially once the Mac OS X 10.6.5 upgrade is available. Here’s the link to OWC who have done some research: http://blog.macsales.com/6856-owc-reveals-which-radeon-video-cards-work-with-2006-2009-mac-pros

Please also look at the follow-up article which covers a lot more: http://blog.macsales.com/7025-mac-pro-and-radeon-video-cards-part-deux

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Upgrading Mac Pro with SSD RAID-0

I’ve upgraded my MacBook Pro with a Solid State Drive (SSD) earlier this year and the speed increase was extraordinary.

While in my Mac Pro have been working four 7200rpm SATA hard disks in a striped disk set (often also called RAID-0) the upgrade to SSD shouldn’t bring to much additional speed to it. Or should it?

I thought I post some of my results here in my blog to give you a hint about the difference of disk speed for HDD, four disk RAID-0 HDD, single SSD and 2 drive SSD.

I used the following hardware:

• Mac Pro 2,1 with 8 cores at 3 GHz
• 12 GB of RAM
• Mac OS X 10.6.4 (same image for all tests)
• One or four Hitachi HDP 725050GLA360
• One or two OCZ Vertex 2 in a Kingston 3.5″ enclosure

Photos of the hardware changes

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In this article I want to show how to implement a Corporate Policy for Macintosh Computers. Everything is based on OpenDirectory in conjunction with Kerberos and OpenSSL. This post is just the start of a series of Corporate Mac integration.

OpenDirectory and Policies on a standalone directory master

Mac OS X Server integrates fine with ActiveDirectory from Microsoft, but this time we want to look at the standalone server for a simpler start. The policies can be found in the OpenDirectory Server Admin console. Go to Settings, click the Policies.

General Password settings

Here you can set the general settings for all user passwords. The first part is all about disabling passwords

Disable Passwords:

In the below picture you can see a good standard configuration. Any user account should be disabled if not used for several days. Some companies are more restrictive and disable the account even after inactivity of 14 days. If the user has entered the password incorrectly more than 5 times, the account should be disabled. This prevents brute force attacks.

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Hint: this is the first entry on Corporate Macintosh computers. You’ll find all the posts around corporate Macs if you click on the Category on the right side.

In the Enterprise Environment we slowly see a change. For years we had a corporate world that officially did not allow anything besides Microsoft. The client computers ran Windows in all its variants.

On the servers there’s a similar picture; mostly Windows as well. Maybe there have been different Unix variants installed for special purposes but the numbers did not reach higher percentages.

Compared to the consumer space the difference has become significantly, we see Apple Computers much more often. Up to 10% market share in the United States is what we have at the moment. This alone would not make the Apple Macintosh ready for the Corporate Environment, but unusual demands have changed the game.

Three factors will change the landscape.

A) The success of the iPhone and iPad brought Apple devices into the corporate environment. IT decision makers had to act quickly to securely integrate the devices into the standard operating environment. The demand from field users and middle management was suddenly there.

B) Due to the exclusive and potentially more appealing Apple computers, executives and the upper management are requesting more and more of those. IT administrators had to react and large amounts of the fortune 500 companies created task forces to securely integrate Macintosh computers into the environment.

C) Over 50% of all college students are using Macintosh Computers on the campus. Once they leave the college a vast amount of users will swamp the market. The demand for those systems will be very high.

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The debate if an iPad is a computer probably will last for a longer period; not knowing what the outcome will be.
I wanted to attach a video from a jailbroken iPad that has a VGA dock connector attached to an external Monitor and bluetooth mouse and keyboard attached. This all is just possible on an iPad that has been jailbroken and nothing of this will be possible from a device out of the box.

You can use the iPad as a nearly full featured computer with network connectivity, mouse, keyboard and video. The video has been taken on a iPhone 3GS, so I wanted to excuse the bad quality.

The hardware:

• Apple Bluetooth Keyboard
• Apple Mighty Mouse
• iPad VGA adapter
• iPad

The software:

• Jailbreak with Cydia and Rock as in-official app store
• BT stack Mouse
• BT stack Keyboard
• Display Out

In the last month or so my desk at home has filled up with paper, hardware and undefined stuff. Therefore I decided to give it a cleaner look. Moved my 23″ CinemaScreen to the left and attached it directly to my Media Server.