Cryptosmith

My first-order attempts to put a modern portable file system on a portable USB device have failed. The Mac, of course, has its own, proprietary file system. OS X has limited support for the Windows NTFS, so my first attempt was to try to use NTFS. This has failed, though it worked for a few months first.

For some incomprehensible reason, OS X will not mount my portable hard drive if it is formatted in NTFS. It doesn’t matter whether I format it using the OS X Disk Utility or if I format it using Windows itself. It doesn’t matter if I do fast or slow formatting. Even worse, I can’t use my third party NTFS file software (Paragon’s package) with it. Nothing works. Continue Reading »

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A recent Handler’s Log on the SANS Internet Storm Center spoke of the recent demise of an early blog site called “Journalspace.com.” Evidently their disaster recovery strategy consisted of maintaining a mirrored RAID system.

I’ve written quite a bit about how mirrored RAID is a fundamental part of my disaster recovery strategy. However, the Journalspace people apparently skipped an essential step: they relied solely on their on-line data and didn’t keep an off-line (preferably off-site) backup.

Continue Reading »

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OK, I switched to Mac e-mail last summer on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger, or some other pussy cat). I tolerated the bumbling of the e-mail software since I knew version 10.5 would be out soon, and no doubt they’d fix the lame bits of the software by then.

But I was disappointed. Mail is just as lame in 10.5 as it was in 10.4. Continue Reading »

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I (think I) have just finished upgrading my system to OS X 10.5. I’m hesitant to declare it a success because I haven’t tried everything yet, though I’ve been reading e-mail and doing most ‘normal’ things. Apple made it difficult, but not impossible, thank goodness.

According to the documentation, all you do to move from 10.4 to 10.5 is an ‘upgrade.’ Perhaps this is true for someone, but evidently not for foolish people like myself who value reliability enough to RAID the system volume. Continue Reading »

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