Geek post. Flee.

Over the weekend, I upgraded my G4 to Panther. I’ve been pretty nervous about doing so, because there were a few things wrong with the existing Jaguar install. The G4 acts as my main fileserver, with 160GB of storage in a mirrored RAID, so it’s pretty important that it didn’t crash and burn during an upgrade.

I got a 120GB drive from Tech-EE’s and crammed it into the G4’s case. With 3 drives, I’ve still got room for 3 more, though I’m not sure the power supply can handle that many, considering the main drive is a Quantum Fireball 18GB SCSI LVD 15,000rpm drive.

I’d hoped copying 120GB of files would be as easy as “copying 120GB of files.” Wrong. Apparently there’s no way to tell any OS to “copy and ignore any errors, dammit!” I tried using ‘cp’ from the terminal, and it decided that since some of the mp3s had odd names that included ampersands or hashes, it’d fail a few hours into the copy. Great.

Finally, Robert suggested using rsync, which happens to be included in a base install of OSX. “rsync -av /directory /otherdirectory”, wait several hours, and the copy was done. The “-av” flag tells rsync to “archive, verbosely”, which means it’ll only copy files that don’t already exist in the target location, or are older than the source files. rsync did show errors, especially considering I was copying from HFS to Fat32 (Fat32 doesn’t support chown, hmm, why not?), but any small amount of file loss is acceptable, considering I was only making a backup “just in case” something terrible happened during the upgrade.

Once the backup was done, I pulled the 120GB drive out and put it into my Windows PC, which has been suffering on an old and multi-partitioned 40GB drive for far too long.

The upgrade to Panther went well, except the User Accounts preference panel was blank. I expected this, because it had been blank since I tried [abortively] to install the Tyrell OpenNMS package. (Note: don’t ever do this. This package is pure concentrated ratshit, squozed down into a small OSX installer. Granted, I installed an earlier package, and Tyrell’s made a newer one, but they still call it an “alpha.” I personally think they should’ve replaced “alpha” with “radioactive anal vomit.”)

After some extensive research, I found the problem. In NetInfo Manager, the user ‘opennms’ had a UID of .. nothing. Beautiful. So, I deleted that username, and deleted any other reference to OpenNMS on the filesystem, and deleted /Users/username/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache, rebooted, and now it works. Hooray.

Now I’m off to smack the Expos?? buttons some more.