10.5: A warning on unsupported Time Machine solutions
If you've used this hint to enable Time Machine backups to non-supported network drives, this hint is for you. In particular, your backups are in danger. I have received a few hint submissions warning about problems with these disks, where everything seems to work fine at first, but when the SMB drive fills up, Time Machine will quickly destroy all of your backups! This seems to happen because Time Machine can't free the space inside the networked sparse image bundles (or the reported space is incorrect). Whatever the cause, Console will show all of your backups being removed once the networked drive fills up. I have placed a strong warning on the original hint (as this issue is noted in the comments there, too). However, I felt it worth running on its own for anyone who may be using an unsupported network drive and isn't yet aware of the impending troubles they...
published on Monday, the 17. December 2007, macosxhints
10.5: Create a Time Machine size limit for networked disks
I am using Time Machine to back up my MacBook Pro on a Samba drive connected to a Linux machine, per this hint. The thing is that when you use Time Machine, it will fill up your disk with backups. However, since I am using a shared networked drive, I wanted to leave free disk space for other users and keep my sysadmin happy. So, here is how you can prevent Time Machine from filling up your networked disk. First, when you use Time Machine with a SMB disk, it creates a .sparsebundle disk image to put the backup data into. The disk image has a capacity of 2.75 TB. Since my SMB disk has only 1.5 TB of capacity, the disk image shows that 1.25TB is used and 1.5TB is available. The trick is to create another sparsebundle disk image of a given capacity (I used 300GB) on the SMB disk. Use 'Mac OS Extend...
published on Wednesday, the 21. November 2007, macosxhints
10.5: Create a Time Machine size limit for networked disks
I am using Time Machine to back up my MacBook Pro on a Samba drive connected to a Linux machine, per this hint. The thing is that when you use Time Machine, it will fill up your disk with backups. However, since I am using a shared networked drive, I wanted to leave free disk space for other users and keep my sysadmin happy. So, here is how you can prevent Time Machine from filling up your networked disk. First, when you use Time Machine with a SMB disk, it creates a .sparsebundle disk image to put the backup data into. The disk image has a capacity of 2.75 TB. Since my SMB disk has only 1.5 TB of capacity, the disk image shows that 1.25TB is used and 1.5TB is available. The trick is to create another sparsebundle disk image of a given capacity (I used 300GB) on the SMB disk. Use 'Mac OS Extend...
published on Wednesday, the 21. November 2007, macosxhints
Store Time Machine backups on an AFP NAS
I was a bit bummed to find my ReadyNAS NV+ wasn't seen by Leopard for Time Machine backups, but I found a workaround. This does require two machines running Lepoard, so if you only have one, beg and plead with a laptop owning friend to borrow his for a few hours.To get started, here is what is needed:An external USB or Firewire drive with enough space for a complete backupTwo separate Lepoard running Macs on the same networkNAS unit of some sort that supports AFP. SMB, and other protocols will not workTo make this easier, lets call the two Macs Mini and MacBook. The steps below will get Time Machine backups working for the MacBook. Starting out, run through these steps on the Mini (Mac 1)Connect the external drive to the MiniRun Disk Utility, and click the external drive, then click the erase tab.Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the type....
published on Wednesday, the 7. November 2007, macosxhints
How to change SMB printer passwords
Our company's Windows network requires periodic password changes, and each time I do this (via a Windows machine, BTW, since I don't know how to do this from a Mac), all my Windows networked printers break. One solution is to delete the printers from Printer Setup Utility and then re-add them, but this gets old fast, especially if you have several networked printers.The easiest method I've found is to first change the passwords directly, and then restart PrintingServices. The passwords are stored in a root-owned file at /etc » cups » printers.conf, in a URL for each printer:DeviceURI smb://USERNAME:password@Workgroup/path/to/printerYou can easily edit this file in Terminal.app with sudo vi /etc/cups/printers.conf (Type :1:$s/old_pword/new_pword to change them all at once!). Save the file, then restart CUPS: sudo SystemStarter restart PrintingServices.
published on Monday, the 2. April 2007, macosxhints