Brian Jepson’s Weblog

One of the things that is annoying me about Vista is that I can’t
connect to my SMB shares on my Mac. When I try to log in, it rejects my
password. I looked at /var/log/samba/log.smbd on my Mac, and here’s
what I saw:

[2006/09/21 13:55:45, 1] auth_ods.c:opendirectory_ntlmv2_auth_user(312)
  User “bjepson” failed to authenticate with
“dsAuthMethodStandard:dsAuthNodeNTLMv2″ (-14090)   

So I poked around the Group Policy Edit (type gpedit.msc into the
search or address box and press enter). I drilled down into:

Local Computer Policy
  -> Computer Configuration
    -> Windows Settings
      -> Security Settings
        -> Local Policies
          -> Security Options

and I changed “Network security: LAN Manager authentication level” to
“Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated” and it
seems to work.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the Pre-RC1 build of Vista working with Boot Camp. I decided to give it a try, and it was pretty easy. You’ll want to perform a full backup before you try this!!!

1. First, run the BootCamp Assistant and delete your Windows installation. This will wipe out all your data, but will restore your Mac to a single partition. You only need to do this if you want to perform the next step.
2. I’m pretty sure Vista won’t run on a FAT32 file system, so you need some way to exchange files between Mac OS X and Windows. I think the best way to do this is to create a third partition. This post (read it all) has lots of details on this. On my MacBook with a 100GB drive, I used this command to shrink my Mac partition and create a 5GB partition for shared data and a 20GB partition for Vista:

   sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 72842723328B \
   "MS-DOS FAT32" Data 5368709120B  \
   "MS-DOS FAT32" Windows 21474836480B
   

3. Next, I rebooted, opened a Terminal, and ran this command to create a FAT32 file system on the Data partition (please check the output of diskutil list /dev/disk0 to be sure you are operating on the right partition first or you may wipe out important data!!!):

   sudo newfs_msdos /dev/disk0s3
   

4. Once I finished these steps, I inserted the Vista DVD, and rebooted the Mac. I held down the Option key as it was starting, and selected the Vista DVD as the boot media.
5. I went through the Vista installer as normal, and all was fine. The only oddity was that when it rebooted, it went into Mac OS X. I opened up System Preferences/Startup Disk and told it to boot from the new Windows partition.
6. I rebooted and setup continued as normal.

One drawback of this is that Bootcamp Assistant won’t run if you have these three partitions, which make it hard for you to burn new driver CDs. However, you should be able to Control-Click on the BootCamp Assistant app, choose Show Package Contents, and find the driver disk .img file that way. I’m sure there will be other annoyances involved with using a non-standard configuration, so I’m prepared to have to delete these partitions and start anew at least a few more times…

I tried loading up FC5 test 2 on Virtual PC on my Mac, and the install went well, but the smoke test (rebooting into my new Linux install) failed miserably with some weird errors:

bad: scheduling from the idle thread!
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer derefence

This was followed by a dialog telling me “An unrecoverable processor error has been encountered. The PC will restart now.”

Per this post on macosx.com, I found a suggestion to use Pentium-MMX as the target architecture instead of Pentium Pro, but the instructions didn’t work perfectly for me. There is a 586 architecture RPM available, but the Fedora installer fails to choose this, and uses the 686 RPM instead.

To actually get the kernel on the target system, I used the Virtual Disk Assistant to create an empty FAT32 disk image, mounted it on my Mac, copied the kernel to it (look for kernel-version.i586.rpm in this directory), and unmounted it.

Then I configured the still-broken Fedora install to use that image as the second disk, put the install DVD into my machine, and booted into rescue mode. I figured I could just chroot to /mnt/sysimage, and rpm -ivh the file I needed. Unfortunately, I got a bunch of errors about the scriptlets, so I had to install it by hand.

First, I mounted /dev/hdb1 (the FAT32 image), copied the kernel over to the root of the boot partition, and then installed it with cpio.

sh-3.1# mkdir /mnt2
sh-3.1# mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt2
sh-3.1# cp /mnt2/kernel-2.6.15-1.1907_FC5.i586.rpm /mnt/sysimage/
sh-3.1# umount /mnt2
sh-3.1# chroot /mnt/sysimage/
sh-3.1# rpm2cpio kernel-2.6.15-1.1907_FC5.i586.rpm | cpio -u --extract

Don’t reboot just yet, because when I tried booting, I got lots of errors from ksign about unsigned modules. It turns out there was one more thing to do: run the post-install scriptlet (which you can find with the command rpm -qp –scripts kernel-2.6.15-1.1907_FC5.i586.rpm):

sh-3.1# /sbin/new-kernel-pkg --package kernel --mkinitrd --depmod --install 2.6.15-1.1907_FC5

Now you’re ready to exit the chroot environment, halt the Fedora virtual machine, eject the DVD, and reboot.

After all the news coming out of Macworld and CES, I find I’m thinking less about MacBooks than I am about dual core Intel chips. Over the past few months, my computers have been taking on very specific roles:

• My Athlon XP system that I built is really my games machine (recently upgraded as cheaply as possible to the minimum requirements of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast)

• The Dell laptop is more and more becoming my work machine (Word, Thunderbird, OpenOffice 2.0, etc.)

• And my 12″ PowerBook spends most of its time plugged into a 20″ monitor. I use it for organizing my music, scanning and editing my family’s slides from the 60s and 70s, and just about anything that has to do with digital media.

Now that core duo laptops are appearing everywhere, I have the opportunity to either buy a new Mac, or put that power where I really need it: a Windows notebook that has the muscle I need for gaming and my day-to-day work, and I could retire my current laptop and desktop.

And then there’s Vista… all these PC laptops coming out seem very much to be Vista-ready, but then again, it’s possible that the MacBook Pro is, as well. So if I wait a little while, maybe I can eliminate the three computers in my office by getting the one that really does everything I
need.

What a weekend. Not only did I relax a lot, and get in a great hike, but I did some repaving. A while back, I wrote about how my Actius would not boot from the CD-ROM drive that it came with. Turns out a call to tech support solved the problem–the CD-ROM drive that they shipped me does not play well with the Actius, so they cross-shipped me a new one. It took a lot longer than it should have, but I got it a few days ago, and that meant I could boot up all the operating systems CDs I wanted to to my heart’s content.