Category Archives: Backup

Backup, Hackery, Promise RAID

In Which the Promise Utility GUI is Not Showing Stats

You open the Promise Utility to get some stats from the Subsystem (Promise Utility > Subsystem Information), but the Promise Utility displays nothing.

You try the command line. Nada. Zip.

Fear not. Try this (your mileage may vary, entirely at your own risk, if you’re not utterly certain what you’re doing, do not do any of this):

1. Umount your Promise volume(s) first.

diskutil unmount /Volumes/NameOfVolume1

2. Unload and delete the kernel extension:

sudo kextunload -b com.promise.driver.stex
sudo rm -rf /Library/Extensions/PromiseSTEX.kext

3. Delete the Pegasus Utility:

sudo rm -rf /Applications/Promise\ Utility.app

4. Delete the Promise Utility plist:

sudo rm -rf /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.promise.PromiseUtility.plist

5. Delete the LaunchDaemons plist files:

sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.promise.emaild.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.promise.bgasched.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.promise.BGPMain_R.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.promise.diskmonitor.plist

6. Delete promiseutil (The Promise Utility installer pkg will re-install this):

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/promiseutil

7. Restart the Mac.

8. Install the Pegasus 6.2.9 driver and the Promise Utility.

9. See if you now have stats for the Promise Pegasus via GUI and CLI.

Backup, Hackery

Mac OS X automated backups of Server 2.x

My colleague and I had been trying to come up with a decent backup script for Server 2.x services on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. We had the skeleton of a Bash script from another colleague but wanted more functionality, so we began bouncing the script back and forth between us. Before we knew it, we had a working system that we now both deploy on 10.8 Server systems, osx-backup.sh.

I like to keep things simple when it comes to backup and this script is no exception. Edit the variables at the top to suit your fancy and then create a nightly cronjob to run it as root and you’re done.

Among the services that get backed up are:

  • Open Directory archive
  • Profile Manager database
  • DNS records
  • Service plists
  • Wiki
  • CalDAV & CardDAV databases

The script automatically shuts down each service that needs to be disabled before backup, then re-enables the service as soon as possible.

On the weekend, over a big pile of bacon on the weekend, we decided to turn the script loose to the community, so my colleague has posted the script on his GitHub repository. This version works with Server 2.2.2 on 10.8.5.

Caveats: Like any backup system, read the script completely and test it before putting it into production.