Mac OS 10.9.0 and Server 3.0.0 and VPN server fails

The combo of Mac OS 10.9.0, Server 3.0.0 and the service VPN server is no winner at the current state. At least with 10.9.0 clients there's big problems (server refusing connections). It's possible to do a workaround though by (back up the binary first) exchanging the 10.9.0 /usr/sbin/racoon binary for one from 10.8 and Server 2. What worked for my was a binary from 10.8.5 (incl Supplementary Update) and Server 2.2.1.

Google Drive and Mac OS 10.9.0

Apparently Google Drive crashes Finder in Mac OS 10.9.0 :-/

Finder restarts automatically and then get killed and so on the loops.

Xen Server 6.1 and virtualised Windows 2008 R2 Server

No,  using Xen Tools 6.0.2 patch 9 didn't solve the problem with the combo of Xen Server 6.1 and Windows 2008 R2 Server (frozen guest servers). Looking at announcements from Citrix and forum posts (and the lack of certain types of posts) it finally seems like Xen Tools 6.1 is patched to a working state (which will be tested). What might be working though is Xen Tools 6.1 with the <b>latest</b> patch and nothing else. Still problems with Windows Volume Shadow Copy though.

Windows 2008 Server R2 & Xen Server 6.1

Windows 2008 Server R2 & Xen Server 6.1 doesn't seem to be good friends. Running Win Srv 2008 R2 on Xen Server 6.1 with more than one virtual CPU can get the virtual server into an overloaded state where it sooner or later crasch or freeze because keeps on running at high CPU level. One quick solution is to only use one virtual CPU. Other solutions might be to downgrade Xen Server or install a specific version of Xen Tools (probably 6.0.2 of a certain patch).

My excuse fo this post? Xen Server is Linux :-)

MOSX MDM and device identity

I discovered a small thing that can make life hard as an Apple device admin. When you enroll a Apple device that has a SIM card to a Apple Mobile Device Management server the server (or the device) uses the SIM card in it's identification. This can confuse the MDM server if for example a user switches device and put the same SIM card in the new device. The MDM server will not be able to distinguish the new device with the old SIM card (not even if you remove the old device) and report it as "New Device" and no pushing of profiles or info gathering works.

The solution is simple though. Before enrolling the SIM card equipped device pop out the SIM card. When the enrollment is finished you can pop back the card and everything works as expected.

Web interface for Blogger

The web interface for creating posts in Blogger (blogspot.com) is really crappy for mobile devices. Ironically enough it is worse in Google Chrome for Android (Google Nexus 7) than for Mobile Safari for iOS (iPad 2). Choosing labels simply don't work in Chrome on Android, all taps pass through the label list into the underlaying text input field ending up hiding the label list and activating the text input field. This is the same on iPhone but in Safari on iPad it works well although it is slightly shaky there as well compared to the interface in Google Chrome or Safari on a computer (MacBook with Mac OS X).

One month with Android alongside iOS

 So, a month with Google Nexus 7 and Android (together with iPad 2 and iPhone 4 and iOS). if I should put it short it could be that I like Android as an operating system but that there's more applications and better applications in iOS.

One thing I have become to like is widgets, both on the lock screen and on the home screens after being logged in. It's very handy for showing information although you have to take security into accont when choosing widgets for your lock screen (widgets are smaller or bigger views of data or shortcuts to features in applications).

Speaking of security, both OS:es offer encryof the device and the data although with diffenrent starting points. In Android you activate the encryption and set a password for the encryption. In iOS the device is encrypted from the beginning but with no password set for decryption. As far as I have seen yet there's no feature for automatic locking or erasing of an Android device. In iOS you can set the device to erase the data after 1-10 failed login attempts. Via iCloud you can also track it, lock it or erase it. Locking and erasing is also possible to do from a Mac Server, which can be you on client if you don't have en extra computer. That means that for about 20 dollars you can get your own lock-or-erasesystem for your iOS devices (and Mac OS X devices as well). When I say erase I use kind of the same phrasing as Apple but what actually happens is that the password for the encryption is removed so the data is still there but it is encrypted and can't be decrypted without cracking the encryption. This means that encryption has to be activated (Mac OS X) and password set (iOS, in Mac OS X the password is set as part of the encryption process). I assume there are systems for this for Android as well but they aren't as well shown and easy to find and supported from the vendor.

I'm jumping around a little from one topic to another. The external speakers is substantially better in both my iPhone 4 and iPad 2 than in my Google Nexus 7 although I don't have any problems with the sound in itself. One thing I'm growing fond of, and I usually don't like spelling correction, is Swiftkey. It actually do such a good work in suggesting words (and has up to three suggestions) that it's usable. It doen't seem to agree fully with apps now and then though. It's not uncommon that I have to touch an text input field one extra time to get the Swiftkey keyboard to appear. Also it is sometimes very slow to appear. A good thing though is that if i connect an external keyboard it keeps the word suggestions although it hides the keyboard.

Looking at applications my general impression is that there are more good-looking and nice-behaving apps for iOS than Android (could be that I have only had Android for a month though). Some things that I really miss in Android is electronic versions of magazines, many distributors seem to go for iOS, and good writing and sketching applications. On iOS I actually have a hard time choosing because there are severall good ones but with slightly different features but for Android I haven't found one good handwriting app with a working wrist protection and I have worked my way through a bunch of them. Also the gaming market seems to be better and more varied for iOS.

A small thing to finish this off. I like the way you remove, move and uninstall applications better in Android, less risk of doing something wrong that you regret. In iOS there's a bigger risk of fumbling and uninstall the wrong app but in Android you would probably only drop the applications in the wrong home screen.

Mac Mini Server rack mounted in data centre

I actually did this for the first time the other day:

The rack is from Sonnet and was nice (screws and sockets not included). You turn it upside down and unscrew three screws to be able to lift the lid. You then put your one or two Mac Mini (Servers) there. Both Mac Mini and Mac Mini Server fit. There's a USB cable from each Mac space that if plugged into the Mac gives you USB access on the front. If you want display adapter/cable that has to go out on the back side though. On the picture a HDMI -> DVI adapter is left plugged in. There's also small holes so you can attach for example the power cord. The back side also have a small shelf if you should need some sort of slightly bigger adapter or similar. Since there's no rails and it's monuted like (and about the size of a) switch you probably want to shut it down anyway if you're doing anything with it physically. It's still nice to attach the power cord to lower the risk of is detaching when you're working with other equippment or cable (who tend to affect each other). On the front there's also CD slots in case you have Mac Mini(s) which have an optical disc reader and a power button with an arm to the actual power button on the back of the Mac Mini (Server).

If you're only putting in one Mac there's a warning for putting disc into the slot of the empty Mac holder :-) and a strip with glue to put over the slot. It make me think of stories of people putting floppy disc into empty bays at their stationary computer.

Some more thoughts on Android and iOS

Ok, so some more thoughts on Android (4.2.1) and iOS (6.1). One of the daily things I really miss in Android is the iOS feature of scrolling to the top when you tap the top of the screen (some applications also reloads the flow when you do that). When I read about this feature the first time I didn't think it was much to the world but apparently I use it a lot. Another daily thing is notifications. The notification center in Android beats iOS' Notification Center hands down. For one thing there's two drop down notification lists in Android; one for more system related things and one for more application related things. Another advantage in Android is that it's possible to remove single notifications, in iOS only all notifications for a certain application. On the other hand in iOS you can remove all notifications from, say, FaceBook. That's not possible in Android. On the third hand in Android it's possible to remove all notificaitons (except for permanent notifications from some apps like some system apps or weather apps that, if you so wish can have a permanent notificaitons there, e. g. CPU usage or the temperature and sunnyness).

To continue the theme of daily often used parts of the system - keyboards. The iOS keyboard is nice and beats the the standard keyboard in Android. Being easier to customize to a bad state Android is, well, easier to customize which means that it's possible to, e. g. replace the not so good standard keyboard. One such keyboard that seems very nice is SwiftKey 3. I have only used it for a while and not near to use it to it's full potential but it's so much better at suggesting words (even in Swedish) than iOS (where word suggestion and correction is a separate feature from the keyboard) that it's actually useful (I usually shuts down all similar features). For one thing it suggests three words instead of one and it also show the words at the top of keyboard instead of in the text wich makes it easy to choose the second or third suggestion. Another thing I like is that one extra character per key is actually printed on the key similar to many physical keyboards. This makes it easier to use less common characters without switiching to some other layout of the keyboard. It also has some unusual, but good I think, layouts. One such is when you tap the key for bringing forward numbers is that they sit to the left as a num pad (in a square instead of a line). A feature from iOS I miss though is the builtin text expanding feature where you can define a short sequence of characters which fils in a longer or more complex sequence, like brb -> be right back or frt -> <\,/\,~~ 

There's two of these daily often used features where the iPad/iOS wins over the Nexus 7/Android and that's the possibility to quickly lock orientation of the screen with a small physical button (or if you prefer, mute the device) and that the switch between portrait mode and landscape mode is much faster on my iPad 2 then the Nexus 7.

The administration of BlueTooth is much better in Android, there you can disable (without forgetting the paired device) single devices, for example my physical keyboard but not my headset while in iOS you can only switch BlueTooth on or off. This often means that all paired devices connects to the iPad/iPhone which isn't always what you wished for. The problem gets less with accessories like the Apple BlueTooth keyboard which can be sort of disconnected by hitting the eject key (which doesn't work in Android with an Apple keyboard).

I'm still struggling with finding applications for all the ways I use my iPad for my Nexus 7. Some are obvious like the list in my last post which exists in both eco systems but for amny thing you have to find equivalents and that requires some work and some money. So far I'm short of applications for:

* Flow chart creation

* Podcast downloading, sorting and listening (doesn't matter much since I do that 98% on my smartphone)

* PDF editing both annotating typed text and handwritten text/sketches

* Hand writing (wrist protection needed) and sketching

Hand writing and sketching and most of all wrist protection seems to be one of the areas where Android still is way behind iOS. Another seems to be digital magazines.

Early impressions of Google Nexus 7

A longer blog post on my early impressions of Google Nexus 7 with Android 4.2 (in comparsion with an iPad 2 with iOS 6.0.1).

The first thing that hits me is that I like the GUI although i have a well imprinted reflex that the device should unlock after I have typed the unlock code, not that I have to tap <enter> afterwards. I would have liked to be able to disbale the sleep state and locking of the device for example if I'm cooking and have the reciept open on my device. Android and iOS has almost the same setting periods but iOS also has ''never'' as a setting. 

The GUI is slick and nice-looking. There are some graphics when switching between apps, settings and similar but not overly much. Just some to better the experience. Except for the unlocking of the device. I have no big difficulties to learn the OS GUI which should mean that it's quite intuitive. Some applications are not as intuitive as the OS, sometimes because their GUI differ from the OS GUI. Speaking of the GUI I think the cursor is to discrete. It's hard to find or follow sometimes.

Something I discovered early is that I, myself, seem to drain some energy from the battery by using my devices. I always seem to have worse battery time than others (even when I don't play games which use a lot of graphics). One reason, I guess, could be that I use the wireless a lot, many synchronisations going on in the background and similar. The accompanying charger is at about 2 A similar to my iPad charger. The charger is reasonbly small looking at the voulme. It is a little wide though and can block outlets in a power chord with several outlets (wich can happen with the iPad charger as well but less often since its wide in another direction). It was a little pity though that my iPhone chargers at about 1 A don't seem to be strong enough to keep the Google Nexus 7 alive. They work for keeping the iPad alive and slowly slowly charge it and they are very compact and easy to bring a few of even in a small bag. It would have been nice to be able to have the same charger for whatever device I need to charge. I usually have two iPhone chargers in my small day bag which means that I know that I can charge two devices when it's Apple devices. Now it seems like I will have to switch chargers depending on what devices I bring which is an extra thing to think of. It also gives the effect that if I bring two Apple devices (e g my private and my work phone) and the Google Nexus 7 I either have to bring one Apple charger and one Asus charger (and not being able to charge both Apple devices at the same time) or bring three chargers (one for each device) or find some new small chargers working for all of my devices (which would be an extra cost). I'll do some more experimenting with the chargers. It seems like it should work with the iPhone charger to keep it alive. Time will show.

Having a new extra clean touch screen I also discovered that I apparently have very dirty little paws. It didn't take long for the screen to be so nice looking anymore. Maybe should get a screen protection that also repulse dirt (as I have for my iPad).

Since I do a lot of writing with my iPad I have a Apple keyboard (I like that one) in a case that unfolds to an iPad stand and keyboard holder. I wanted to be able to use that one for whichever of my devices and it works fine with iPhone, iPAd and Google Nexus 7. A bonus with iOS is that it's possible to ''sleep'' the keyboard and ''wake it up'' with the eject button on the keyboard. A bonus with Android on the other hand is that <alt> + <tab> works for switching between applications. It's quite nice to be able to do that without leaving the keyboard. When pairing with a BlueTooth keyboard on iOS it uses the keyboard layout that the OS is using and I don't know if that's possible to change. In Android it is possible to set keyboard layout independently for virtual keyboard and physical keyboard. When attaching my keyboard with Swedish layout to my Android with Swedish virtual keyboard the keyboard got U.S. layout but Android notified me and asked if I wanted to set the layout for the newly attached keyboard. When typing (for example this text) in Android on the Nexus 7 I think the fonts mostly are nice but the cursor is a little too discrete and sometimes hard find or follow but maybe I get used to that after a while.

Although I primarily use Apple computers with Mac OS and iOS devices both in work as System Administrator and privately I don't use Apple cloud services that much (mainly for backing up my devices settings, sharing open web browser tabs and similar). Instead I use Google Apps for business with my own domain. That made it very easy to get going with the new device since I almost only had to login with my Google account and then had mail, calendars, chat, blogs and one of two big social network services ready to go. 

Very soon I also started to think that my iPad is a little heavy and not so easy to handle but without having ahd the possibility to do any good comparsion between the Google Nexus 7 and the iPad Mini I think they are very similar in those aspects. They're about the same weight but the iPad Mini is slightly larger but have a more larger screen than the whole device is larger (the device surface is more effectively used for physical screen).

One thing I started to like soon was the better notifications about what applications I install wants to do and settings for what they will be able to do. The settings for these kind of things are very broad in iOS. Also the equivalent to the iOS Notification Center in Android is better. It shows more and is divided in two parts. More system oriented notifications to the right and more applications oriented notifications to the left.

 

When I first started up the device and started to download applications there were a grace period for authorising spending money in the app shop (Google Play) with I didn't really like since that means that it is easier to make mistakes or maybe for a kid to keep on buying and buying. Besides that I just like that I have to authenticate to authorise things like shopping on the device. In iOS 6 there's a setting for forcing the user to authenticate everytime which effectively blocks shopping if you don't have the credentials for the connected Apple ID or, which is OK, switch to your own Apple ID. When i upgraded to 4.2, which soon appeared, Google Play started to ask for credentials every time which I think is good but there's still no setting for it. you have to live with whatever the OS is set on. Android still allows for installations of free apps without authentication which I don't really like either. Both iOS and Android allows upgrading of apps without authentication.

It seems like Google Nexus 7 is gonna be able to be a good replacement for communication, reading and blogging but i will miss a lot of my games from the iPad and also there seem to be fewer sketching apps and maybe fewer digital versions of papers/magazine but time might show otherwise.

I'll finish this off with a list of applications that i have used in iOS 6.0.1 and also found for Android 4.2

* WordFeud

* Evernote

* Dropbox

* Gmail

* FaceBook

* Google+

* Google Drive

* BeeJive IM

* Skype

* Pinterest

* Last.fm Scrobbler (in iOS I used CludScrob which only scrobbles, Last.fm Android App do more)

* Instagram

* LinkedIn

* Tapatalk forum app

* Twitter's own Twitter App but none of the two I mostly use (Twitterific and TwitBird Pro)

* Tumblr's own app

* Google Maps

* gTasks (Google Tasks App)

* Todo.txt (Task organizing app using a textfile for storage, versatile from many different interfaces)

* Google Chrome

* Comixology (so far tried Mouse Guard wich works fine in guided mode but not so fine with whole pages)

* Dark Horse Comics

* EMP Magazine (Sweden Rock Shop catalouge)

* Bluefire Reader (e-book reader that understands the protections of the e-books from Swedish libraries)

* Safari to go (Safari Books Online with offline storage)

* Kindle (e-books from Amazon)

Moon+ Reader Pro seems to be a nice PDF reader replacement. So far I have only read the PDF versions of Girl Genious wich is i kind of A4 format but haven't tested any A4 text heavy PDF:s wich I have heard can be a problem on a 7 inch screen.