Mac Photos Library on a NAS

I struggled a bit to find out how to store my Photo Library on a NetGear ReadyNAS. SMB did not work, and SSHFS did not work either. I was unable to get AFP working too, and I saw that it was discouraged.

The solution was to mount the drive using NFS. Then I created a sparse bundle disk image with a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition with an Apple Partition Map, on the NFS mounted partition, and moved my Photos Library.photoslibrary onto the mounted image. Everything seems to be running fast and smoothly. (I’m on a gigabit LAN.)

It should be noted that I use ext4 for my NAS partitions, don’t know if it matters.

Time Machine backup to NTFS without installing anything

Here’s a way to use an NTFS drive for Time Machine backups, even though it is used for other purposes too.

Find out the NTFS drive volume’s UUID:

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diskutil info /Volumes/DRIVENAME | grep UUID

Put this in fstab: (Replace ENTED_UUID_HERE with the one you found from the previous command.)

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sudo echo "UUID=ENTER_UUID_HERE none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse" >> /etc/fstab

Eject, plug out and back in. MAKE SURE THE DRIVE WAS SAFELY REMOVED FROM WINDOWS, or it will not mount RW in Mac (See dmesg when plugging in).

Find your RW mounted volume

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open /Volumes

Now we will create a Mac OS disk image on the NTFS volume.

  1. Open Disk Utility
  2. Click New Image
  3. Select a large enough size
  4. Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
  5. Partitions: Single Partition - Apple Partition Map
  6. When done, mount this image

Now we will tell Time Machine to use this disk. It does not show up in the list of available drives, so we will use a command:

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sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/MOUNTED-DISK-IMAGE

(Replace MOUNTED-DISK-IMAGE with the disk image you created, NOT the NTFS drive)

Now just test backing up and see that it works.

Resources:

I use this for backing up to my NAS via SMB/NFS

Mac OS X preferences, improvements and config tricks

So I bought a MacBook Pro and wanted to start using Mac OS X as my primary OS. I’m used to Windows/Linux so I have some preferences as to behaviour. There are some things that are kind of annoying, many of which can be fixed. Also there are some tricks that make me more productive.

Command line settings

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# Disable trackpad acceleration:
defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.trackpad.scaling -1
# If you have an external mouse, you have to disable its acceleration separately:
defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1
# Always show Finder path bar
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathbar -bool true
# Always show Finder status bar
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowStatusBar -bool true
# Show full path in Finder title:
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES; killall Finder
# Set Current Folder as Default Search Scope
defaults write com.apple.finder FXDefaultSearchScope -string "SCcf"
# Show All File Extensions
defaults write -g AppleShowAllExtensions -bool true
# Dock instant hide/show (disable Dock animation):
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.00; killall Dock
# Disable character picker
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
# Speed up animation
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.03
# Don’t prompt for TimeMachine when plugging devices
defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool true
# Disable two finger swipe back/forward in browser etc.
defaults write com.google.Chrome AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool FALSE
# Disable local time machine (I have an external backup)
sudo tmutil disablelocal
# Disable Creation of Metadata Files on Network Volumes
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true
# Disable Auto-Correct
defaults write -g NSAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled -bool false
# Disable SpotLight (saves space and CPU)
sudo mdutil -a -i off

Reduce animations

Makes mac faster and use less CPU/power:

System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce transparency

Improve WiFi/AirPlay performance

Reduce stuttering in AirPlay Mirroring by disabling the extra wifi channel.

Make a script:

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#https://medium.com/@mariociabarra/wifried-ios-8-wifi-performance-issues-3029a1$
UPDOWN="$1"
case "$UPDOWN" in
    up|down) echo "$UPDOWN" ;;
    *) echo 'Specify up or down'; exit 1 ;;
esac
sudo ifconfig awdl0 "$UPDOWN"

Other

Use Touch ID for sudo

Add to /etc/pam.d/sudo/etc/pam.d/sudo:

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auth       sufficient     pam_tid.so

Tricks

Finder

Go to path: Cmd + Shift + G

cd .. Cmd + ↑

cd / “Run” file Cmd + ↓

Print screen: Cmd + Shift + 4 (press space to select window)

Keyboard shortcuts

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> keyboard move focus to next window: Cmd+<

References

XBMC memory leak remedy

XBMC (now Kodi) has always had a tendency of leaking memory, so that it will eventually thrash and crash. My simple solution to this is to run xbmc inside a for loop instead of directly (just run the script from .xinitrc):

xbmc_angel.sh:

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#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]; do
        xbmc
        nohup sleep 10
done

…And add the following to the local XBMC user’s crontab:

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0 4 * * *       killall xbmc.bin

This will kill XBMC every night at 4 o’clock. And give you a fresh XBMC every day!

How to download videos from Pepper Flash on linux

The new Pepper Flash plugin broke my old script for listing/downloading cached flash/flv videos.

Here is a new script. Uses sudo because the /proc/$PID/fd directory is root only.
This solution is based on silviot‘s solution here: http://superuser.com/questions/622606/how-do-i-save-the-buffered-flash-video-on-linux.

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#!/bin/bash
for FLASHPID in $( pgrep -f chrom ) ; do (for FLASHFILE in $(sudo ls -l /proc/$FLASHPID/fd|egrep "(/tmp/Flash|Pepper Data)" | sed -r 's/^.* ([0-9]+) -> .*$/\1/'); do echo /proc/$FLASHPID/fd/$FLASHFILE; done ); done

Then you can just copy the file into home, like:

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cp /proc/26493/fd/30 ~/

ReadyNAS RN102 constant activity remedy

My Netgear ReadyNAS RN102 keeps constantly writing to a file /var/readynasd
I don’t want to hold my breath waiting for Netgear to fix this so I took matters into my own hands and implemented a TMPFS fix for my NAS.
What it does is mount /var/readynasd as a tmpfs of 2MB, and copy files to here from /etc/readynas-db on every boot, and copy back every hour, and on shutdown.

Setup instructions

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systemctl stop readynasd
mkdir /etc/readynasd-db
cp -a /var/readynasd /etc/readynasd-db/

Edit /lib/systemd/system/tmpdb.service:

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[Unit]
Description=Mount RAMFS for SQLITE DB file
Before=readynasd.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c "mount -t tmpfs -o size=2m tmpfs /var/readynasd && cp -a /etc/readynasd-db/readynasd /var/"
#ExecStop=/bin/sh -c "cp -a /var/readynasd /etc/readynasd-db/" # TODO not working
RemainAfterExit=yes
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Edit /etc/cron.daily/tmpdb-sync

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#!/bin/bash
cp -a /var/readynasd /etc/readynasd-db/

Now finish up:

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chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/tmpdb-sync
systemctl enable tmpdb
reboot