Nick Taylors blog

SANS SCORE is a good effort in promoting minimum security standards and best practices. Amongst the various checklists, I came across a good one for OSX, with Eric Conrad being the team lead. 

Along with Apples “Mac OS X Security Configuration for Version 10.5 Leopard” [PDF link], it provides a good background into securing your Mac. 

I’ve a mirrored version of the SAN document here.

I’ve recently bought a 2nd generation Drobo. It’s a cool little box that attaches to my Mac Pro via Firewire 800.

I had some drives from my failing ReadyNAS 600 (now retired), so after temporarily copying the data to a non-resilient drive I loaded the following in the the Drobo and copied the data onto it.

Slot 0: 1TB Hitachi HUA721010KLA330
Slot 1: 1TB Hitachi HUA721010KLA330
Slot 2: Seagate 750GB ST3750640NS
Slot 3: Seagate 750GB ST3750640NS

These are good quality SATA 3.0 Gbit/s drives that I even ran through SpinRite (highly recommended) to check for errors.

Anyway, I’ve discovered that when I unlock my Mac Pro (the screensaver automatically locks after a while, but I don’t put it to sleep), the Drobo restarts. No warning, just a whirring reboot. I’m running the 1.2.2 firmware and the 1.2.1 dashboard. I’ve tried plugging it into another Firewire port and also unplugging my other Firewire devices with no luck.

I’ve logged a support ticket with Drobo, let’s see what they come up with.

This is a great suggestion from lifehacker.

I have loads of hotel, airline and other membership cards. In fact, I don’t have a wallet big enough for them all so they sit in a drawer at home. I used to have a list of the numbers somewhere, but it quickly became out of date.

One thing I do have with me 95% of the time is my iPhone. And now, as I’ve scanned all my cards and put them in a gallery in Aperture and sync’ed with my iPhone, I have all my cards with me when I need them!

The only two issues I see are, 1, don’t just credit cards, drivers licence, etc. as your phone may be lost/stolen, and 2, it’s difficult to swipe the mag stripe!

Here’s the original article.

My Mac Pro had suffered from bloat even before I upgraded to Leopard. I performed the simple upgrade, rather than “Archive and Install” or “Erase and Install”. I’ve been in this business enough years to know better! Anyway, after deciding against the expensive option of buying the Apple RAID card and 2 or 4 300GB SAS drives ($600 each!), I simply blatted the boot drive and performed a clean install of Leopard.

Of course, it takes an age to reinstall all your applications and utilities and to get it just the way you want it. I’m mostly back to where I want to be and much happier. Firstly, the system is far more stable and secondly, it’s so much snappier.

Here’s hoping the extra 8GB memory arrives today!