Mac Migration Assistant from Time Machine Backup

I just upgraded to a new MacBook Pro. I spent *hours* trying to get Migration Assistant to do the network transfer from the old one to the new one. All I could deduce was that it wasn’t working because NFS couldn’t connect to the old one – most likely because I’d changed something that prevented it from working. (I was playing with NFS a few months ago).

Next choice: migrate from the latest time machine backup of the old one. I made sure that the old one had just finished a successful backup and then turned Time Machine off (because I didn’t want the old one writing to the backup while the new one was restoring…)

Next, Migration Assistant: select from Time Machine backup. Empty window. What?

My Time Machine drive is on a network machine (actually running OpenIndiana for ZFS mirror redundancy and netatalk for Apple File Sharing). If I try to set up Time Machine on the new machine, it sees my Time Machine drive. Why doesn’t Migration Assistant see it?

The answer is simple, but not obvious. You need to manually mount the backup’s .sparsebundle image file, so that you have both the Time Machine network drive and the Time Machine disk image mounted. Then Migration Assistant will see it.

Select the drive, select what users/settings to migrate. Go. Took a few hours to do the 200ish GB – done by the time I woke the next morning.

At the end of the day, a very smooth transition, with all my settings, icons, etc. ready to roll on the new one – although there were a few hurdles along the way…

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Using Git on Mac OS X

There’s a mac gui client called GitX, which lives at: http://gitx.frim.nl/

However, it’s a little out of date, in that it’s been forked on github many times, and brotherbard has released a version which is *way* more advanced in features.

I tried this one out: GitX Sep-20-2010.2.zip from here http://github.com/brotherbard/gitx/downloads – way cool.

Goodbye OpenSolaris, Hello OpenIndiana

After the demise of OpenSolaris no thanks to Oracle, there’s finally a community fork available: OpenIndiana. I did the upgrade from OpenSolaris, following the instructions here, and it all seemed pretty straight forward. There were a few things that I’d installed (eg wordpress) which had dependencies on the older OpenSolaris packages, but apart from those few things, it appears like everything’s moved over to the new OpenIndiana package server nicely.

Netatalk (for my Time Machine backup) still runs perfectly.

It certainly will be interesting to see what comes from the community fork!

optus daylight savings bungle

Where I live, daylight savings does not occur. In the state to the south (NSW) it does. Optus, being the brilliant phone network they are, have enabled daylight savings on their network all over Australia, including Queensland, which does not have daylight savings. Thanks, dumbos.

Optus. Fail. Again.