geekery

DropBox Smart Sync and High Sierra; or, I thought I was supposed to upgrade, why me.

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Not interested in my ramblings? Skip down.

If you’ve been paying attention to the narrative coming from IT over the past few years, including us, one of the most recurring themes is this:

Stay up to date.

Staying up to date is the number one way to keep your hardware running well and, most critically, keep you secure. In the past, this advice came with some wincing, since updates, particularly system updates, could bring along a plethora of issues. This wincing advice was gradually replaced with certainty––Apple Mac OS updates have been more and more robust over the past few years, to the point where I was almost, almost ready to just start pulling the plug and upgrading to the latest version of the OS as soon as it came out.

But lo, Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. High Sierra definitely tooketh away.

I mean, percentage wise, it’s still been pretty painless. There have been some really wince-worthy security issues with High Sierra, but in terms of functional show-stoppers, it’s still in the 10% range. It says a lot about the past few years that this feels really bad.

But one thing that has been completely consistent throughout our High Sierra deployments is that new installs of DropBox do not work with Smart Sync.

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Unable to load replica list in Yosemite Server, or Active Directory can’t be joined after upgrading

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NOTE: If you have the much more common ‘Ooops, OS X Server just randomly decided to eat the most important part of my configuration’ that can result in the above error, this thread on Apple Discussion forums might prove handy. I’d write it up on the site if I figured out a surefire to fix this outside of just restoring from a OD backup you’ve hopefully made, but it makes me angry that the backups can’t be scheduled, and there is no other way to fix it, so I don’t consider myself to have a ‘fix’ just yet.

I just upgraded a client’s OS X Server from Mavericks to Yosemite 10.10 OS X server. They use Windows Server 2012 for authentication and user services through Active Directory, and the Mac server simply joins to the domain to grab authentication and user/group information.

After the upgrade, Open Directory fired on just fine, and local Open Directory users were hunky dory, but the replica list, which would typically list what AD master had been joined, simply said ‘Unable to load replica list’.

Typically, I get a little trickle of fear anytime OS X server gives me any kind of message about being unable to load anything, because that has led me down some very dark rabbit holes indeed. But this time, just as I was about try and go through the process of re-connecting the AD server (which, by the way, cannot be done with WorkGroup manager anymore) I was lucky enough to google about and stumble on this KB from apple:

http://support.apple.com/en-us/TS4600

It doesn’t pertain to it directly, but it’s close enough. To paraphrase the directions:

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Kyocera Taskalfa and Google Apps SMTP

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I like to keep my titles understandable by everyone, but I’ll fully admit to giving this one a few attempts before giving it all up. Sadly, there’s just not much of a way to talk about sending email from printers without involving acronyms that one would be justified for suspecting of associating with curse words during the night.

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Group Members can’t access OS X Server wiki, or, users and groups can’t be added

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So for a long time, there was a group set on the Out of a Jam Staff wiki. And lo, all was well. Users were added to the group, and access was had by all.

Then, one day, Michael added a new employee to the JamStaff group and and behold – they had zilch for permissions on the wiki. Being in the middle of running around like a chicken with its head cut off and its hair on fire, Michael simply added the user directly and gave them access. “I’ll fix that someday,” he told himself and, as is always the case with such things, someday never came. As time went on, it got more and more annoying, but he got more and more used to it as well, so there you go. Apathy is the immovable object.

Fast forward to today, and not only did being part of the group do zip, but it actually wasn’t possible to add a user directly to the wiki either. Oh, you could add, but saving would give a nasty red message saying ‘Error Saving ACL’s’. Wondering if the ill fated  group, which lit up in red at that message as well and was set as owner, might be part of the problem, Michael attempted to delete it. When it vanished, attempting to save just gave an unhelpful ‘Error Saving Settings’ and that’s it.

Huh.

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LOLcats and Schizophrenia

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This is fascinating enough that I have to mention it. We’re all familiar (most of us, anyway), with the LoL cats internet meme. The bane of Facebook pages today, there are actually some legitimately funny entries. But there have been pictures of cats with funny quotes for as long as there have been cat fans, … Read more