Mailing Lists: Apple Mailing Lists
 Image of Mac OS face in stamp
Re: OS X 10.3 and MM Home Directory badness
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: OS X 10.3 and MM Home Directory badness

"Mark DeHate" <email@hidden> writes:
>I successfully put the server back the way it was before, with the extra entry
>on the bottom. People can log in, but it still is quite slow when multiple
>users login. DNS is resolved forward and backwards; it's running right from
>the OS X 10.3 server. However, all of the clients access the server by IP
>address and don't have the DNS server set to go to the OS X server - why is it
>necessary when the clients access the server by IP address?

One some of the references are via IP directly - other buried parts are by dns
name. It might be possible MM clients might get by without DNS if you have
appletalk running on the server but appletalk can also cause the MM process of
the server to go nuts (consume 100% cpu and do nothing.) the solution is to
turn off appletalk (or 10.3 is supposed to have turned off the vulnerability by
disallowing appletalk as a means by which clients can identify the server
anyway.)

I would suggest you get Norton 8, install on a firewire drive which has 10.3
running, upgrade to 8.02 (sometimes very difficult, sometimes easy) and then
run disk doctor and speed disk on the server.

for speed disk the most important part is the catalog btree - often if it is
fragmented Speed Disk will report the drive is moderate/severe/extreme just by
click on the drive. But the only way to defragment this part of the directory
structure itself is to fully optimize. So you can start a full optimization and
stop it when you think the medium green area at the front of the drive is done.
Act with great patience - force quitting Speed Disk is a dangerous proposition.
Sometimes Speed Disk will continue to run for a while and sometimes it wont
pick up your stop click.

You could let Speed Disk just run and fully optimize the drive but this puts a
great pile of stuff next to the catalog btree. Norton comes with a Speed Disk
editor which lets you create a profile and I created one which isolates the
catalog btree pretty well from everything else (except the desktop databases)
so it has almost unrestricted space to grow as it is needed. Use something like
that profile and let speed disk run all the way once a year or less and it
should stay in good health.

But the full monty doesn't do equal good work (a lot of time is spent doing
little or no good while alittle time is spent doing much good) and takes a lot
of time. The most important part is the above. There is a second category of
fragmentation that matters more than the rest (as you may read elsewhere there
are a number of optimizations and defaults in the OS which mitigate strongly
against the deleterious effects of fragmentation.) If a file is at or over 20MB
and/or fragmented in over 7 parts the OS will not spend effort to defragment it
in the background and it will be significantly slowed over files with fewer
fragments. Speed Disk can help with these if you have contiguous free space -
hit apple+L and it will list the fragmented files, their size and how many
fragments they are in and you can sort by the column by clicking on it. So I
click the size column to get a feel for any large files and defrag if necessary
and then do the same again for the number of fragments (it will spend a while
re-analyzing but still less than fully optimizing the hd.)


Of course defragmenting is a sensitive process and a very bad time for anything
unexpected to happen. Often, rather than defragment, people backup a drive,
erase it, and re-fill it. This will indeed correct all the problems Speed Disk
will treat as long as you don't run any other process against the drive at the
same time. And it is a reason to get another drive and put your home folder
there - but that is a then/there solution, not a here/now.

BTW, DO NOT USE NORTON 7 - it's incompatible with journaling (causes kernel
panics) and journaling under 10.3 is normal/expected.

' ' ' ' ' ' ''"""""""""""'' ' ' ' ' '
Steven Kolins
Alamance-Burlington NC USA, Mac Systems Tech
mailto:email@hidden
http://homepage.mac.com/smkolins
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.
_______________________________________________
macintosh-manager mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/macintosh-manager
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.



Visit the Apple Store online or at retail locations.
1-800-MY-APPLE

Contact Apple | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2011 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.