Starting over (again)

Lovely new MacBook Air — light as a feather pillow.

Power up.

Switch on.

My Air arrived with zero charge. I had a nervous few minutes with no response from the power button. I had time to read the FAQ, try again, and panic briefly before it eventually had enough charge to start up.

Setup admin account

Setup wireless

Software update

This may take some time (for me this was an 870MB download). While waiting you can Install Firefox

Software update again

Repeat until there are no further updates

Migrate user data from your TimeCapsule backup

Do this over ethernet, unless you want a long wait (I had 40GB to migrate. I get 2-3GB/h over a wire connected to my remote Express — 1.5GB/h with two wireless hops, and 7-8GB/h when wired directly to the Time Capsule.)

Setup user accounts

Include a working account for yourself

Configure Time Machine Backup for your new machine.
Start the initial backup.

This will take even more time (my initial backup is requires transfer of 55GB of data).

You can carry on with other tasks meanwhile. You can interrupt the process ("Stop Backing Up" in the Time Machine Menu), and resume later. Again, do as much of this as possible over a wired connection, to speed things up.

Use Calaboration to sync your Google calendars with iCal

Install Fink and Fink Commander

This allows you to install and manage various Unix utilities. I start with emacs-carbon.

Install MacPorts and Porticus

This also allows you to install and manage various Unix utilities and for many has more up-to-date versions. It also has a port of polyml. I start with polyml, tetex, bibtex2html and hevea. Porticus doesn't have carbon-emacs.

Install Kerberos Extras

Our "staffmail" imap server supports Kerberos authentication - just use the realm EASE.ED.AC.UK and your EASE user name and password. Unfortunately Apple haven't yet implemented this fundtionality on the iPhone — so syncing broke my email on the iPhone.

Change back to password authentication; sync again, so mail on the iPhone is back to normal; turn off sync; turn on Kerberos authentication on the Mac.

Install Developer Tools

Apart from anything else, this is probably the easiest way to get CVS installed.

Download iPhone SDK

Useful for the iPhone emulator which lets you see how your web pages will look on the iPhone. Maybe someday I'll write some code too!

Turn on the Safari Develop menu

To display the Develop menu in Safari 3.1 or higher, select the checkbox labeled "Show Develop menu in menu bar" in Safari's Advanced Preferences panel.

Time Machine hangs? Spotlight responsible?

Time Machine and Spotlight run slowly over wireless...

So slowly, that it appears that the system has hung.

Time Machine is great — but ...

Making the first backup of a 60GB of data takes a very long time over wireless.

Making a large incremental backup, after being away for a week, or more takes a very long time over wireless. Even over 802.11n I find Time Machine, backing up over my WDS, manages about 1MB/sec. Say 1GB takes 16 minutes, then 60GB takes 16 hours!

If Spotlight is indexing the backup while the backup is changing, things go even slower.

Solution: For the first backup, or for an incremental backup after you've been on the road, first turn of Spotlight indexing for the backup. Then connect your Mac by ethernet cable directly to the LAN port on the Time Capsule, and leave it to chunter away overnight. Finally, turn indexing on to let Spotlight digest the backup.

To see what Time machine and Spotlight are up to, use the console to inspect the logs. Set the filter so you see messages from backupd. You should see a sequence of messages appear slowly (but no longer very slowly), like this:

Starting standard backup 
Network volume mounted at: /Volumes/Data 
Disk image /Volumes/Data/myMacBook0016cb896cb9.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Backup of myMacBook 
Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup of myMacBook/Backups.backupdb 
No pre-backup thinning needed: 2.21 GB requested (including padding), 801.41 GB available 
Copied 22 files (24.4 MB) from volume Macintosh HD. 
Starting post-backup thinning 
No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist 
Backup completed successfully.

Each line starts with date and time and the label /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[22205]

Note:

Spotlight should be allowed to index your backup — so that you can find valuable nuggets of information lost in the past. Spotlight is also very slow if it has to index 60GB over wireless — if you do this, your log may also include lines like:

Waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing /Volumes/Backup of myMacBook/Backups.backupdb 

The solution is the same — when Spotlight has lots of changed stuff to index in the backup, let it work over ethernet. If you unplug and go wireless immediately your big backup is done, Spotlight will spend a long time catching up — and it won't let the next hourly backup begin until it has caught up.

Spotlight crashes

In addition, spotlight crashes: mdworker does the Spotlight indexing — you may find messages like this:

Formulating crash report for process mdworker[22921] 
(0x10c720.mdworker[22921]) Exited abnormally: Bus error 

When this happens, it slows things down even more. It's a bug — every crash is a bug. Some discussions suggest that it may by triggered when Spotlight attempts to index ill-formatted emails.

You can tell Spotlight not to index emails — and it may have some effect. Waiting patiently also seems to work — and I need to be able to search for mail by content, so I have to let Spotlight index my mail.

Time Capsule

Setup

Time Capsule is an airport extreme base station (802.11 a, b, g, n) with built-in hard drive for backup.

You set up the base station as usual, using AirPort Utility.

You can use your old base station to create a WDS network and extend your wifi coverage to attic or garden – or share with a neighbor. In any case, APPL say, you should make the Time Capsule your main base station – the one directly connected to your ISP.

If you just have 802.11n-capable access points you can let your network autoconfigure. Choose a common Network Name, Wireless Security and Password. Under Airport > Wireless set the main base station to Create a wireless network; set the other base stations to Extend a wireless network.

A domestic ISP typically gives you internet access via a single IP address. Depending on your ADSL or cable hardware you have various options for setting up your system to distribute local IP addresses to clients on your local network.

My ADSL modem is a speedtouch router. It provides a DHPC server with optional MAC authentication. WDS setup is simple: each base station is configured to get its own IP address as a DHCP client, and to act as a bridge passing wifi client traffic to and from the ADSL modem.

If your ADSL or cable modem isn't set up as a DHCP server, you can get the Time Capsule (or any Airport base station) to do this. Set the main base station to "Share a public IP Address" (under Internet).

If your modem provides a range of addresses that clients can select manually, you can set the main base station to distribute these. Select "Distribute a range of IP addresses."

Backup

Time Machine sometimes gets confused and can't mount the backup disk. Apple say the volume name should be shorter than 27 characters. Elsewhere they say it should be purely alphanumeric [0-9,a-z,A-Z]*