SVMUG - February 18, 2008

Tonight! Drobo Storage Robot!

Introduction — Host: Charles Gousha

Rumors are about that Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac has “production” problems, that is the actual product media can not be processed fast enough. Perhaps disk serialization - DRM problems? Underestimated demand. People who are using it are saying it is a good product — works well. It does have a completely different UI on the Mac compared to the PC, and the Mac UI is said to be much better.

Is Office 2008 better than 2004? No worst, says the user.

At MacWorld Expo, there was an arrest of a person who set up a malicious forgery of the official WiFi network. It was a peer-to-peer.

It is always good to be aware of the way that peer-to-peer networks work, and how the menubar icon looks for a peer-to-peer network.

Rumors about new Mac Book Pro’s? February 19? or 26? Or a special event on the 29? Shareholders meeting on March 4th. Any shareholder may attend — if they arrive early.

Apple has $18 billion in cash.

Yahoo is being sought by Microsoft, but Yahoo has declined the offer. The Yahoo board wants $60/share, Microsoft offered $44/share. Microsoft could expand their customer contact base, but what else might Microsoft be getting by this deal? Does not seem very clear. Is it just trying to tweak Google’s nose? If Microsoft does this, they will be burning right through their cash. That’s dangerous.

Apple is expanding the campus.

Apple TV: version 2.0 — finally shipped last week. $299

New iPhone and iTouch models are out, with more memory, but no other changes.

iPhone is apparently a big hit in China — whole businesses are set up there to hack the iPhone into the Chinese cellular networks.

AT&T will offer WiFi at Starbucks, with two hours free per day per customer. AT&T Uverse customers get it free. T-Mobile will cease to the vendor at Starbucks, but a cross agreement will allow T-Mobile customers to have access.

Aperture 2.0 is out — at a cheaper (by half!) price.

Macintosh news sites you may wish to check out: mac.alltop.com macnn.com mactidbits.com

Think Secret has shutdown, as the owner/operator wanted to move on, and as a settlement with Apple over the question of confidential sources.

SANS recommends “get a mac”.

Blu-Ray seems to have won the DVD format war.

Note: the 1080i HD on Blu-Ray is heavily and lossy compressed. There will be future formats to replace it!

The new update to Leopard is receiving very good reviews — stable — be patient when installing as it takes a long time, many minutes, to upgrade the firmware and the graphics cards. It will reboot twice as part of the process.

Vendor Presentation

Drobo Storage Robot Drobo == “Data Robot”

June 2007 original product release.

The four bay box appears as a single volume. Data is replicated across the installed drives in the four bays, so that a drive can swapped out of a bay without losing data or interrupting operation. This protects against drive failure. LED indicators show when it is safe to pull a given drive.

The drives are 3.5 inch SATA drives, however you may mix and match drives of different capacities and manufacturers. Drobo handles all configuration automatically as drives are added or removed.

The storage is considered to be a virtual volume, that uses the pooled storage of the available drives in the bays. The virtual volume can be partitioned into several volumes. Each such partition can have any format desired: HFS+, FAT32, etc.

When a bad drive is pulled, the data redunancy prevents data loss, and the Drobo will rebuild the redunancy on the remaining good drives. Depending the number of good drives in the bays, it will use a method similar to RAID 1 or RAID 5. The firmware will support up to 16 Terabytes (4 drives of 4 TB each).

Drobo Share - new product introduced at MacWorld Expo - enhancement to the Drobo Robot. Network mounting of a Drobo Robot.

Q&A

1. Syncing with .Mac: fails due to “inconsistent data”.

Usually the conflict manager handles these problems. No one else seems to be familiar with this particular error message. It may be necessary to erase the sync files from your iDisk, and start fresh.

1. “Spaces” application with two monitors: in mirror mode, I get four views, and in alternate mode, I get eight views.

We were not able to duplicate the exact circumstance, but we believe this is not a bug, simply an unexpected way of showing the “spaces” controls, or a difference in philosophy of how the monitors should be used: as one display space or as two independent display spaces.

1. DocX file extension: what is it?

This is the new Microsoft Office document file format, for the 2007 and 2008 versions. You can set the Office preferences to use the old format. This format is an XML encoding.

1. iMac DSL connection keeps dropping as shown by the internal IP address changing, i.e. getting a new DHCP lease.

This could be a cable fault, where is keeps breaking the connection.

1. Safari - using PDF browser plugin - no longer works on my new Mac.

Try looking in the “Internet Plug-ins” folder, to see if there is conflicting plug-in. Check both the top level library and your user library.

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