Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Last night my friend Mike and I decided it was time to upgrade the Xserve that hosts this site from 10.4.10 to 10.5.0. We traveled downtown to the co-lo facility, and immediately discovered that we had been locked out. The card reader at the door did not respond to our swipes. We called someone from Time Warner to let us into the room, and he informed us that the card reader system had just been upgraded, so there may be some kinks.

We installed the Leopard upgrade, and when the server rebooted, it told us the serial number provided with the software was invalid. A trip to the Apple support discussion forums provided the answer. It’s a known bug. We entered the new serial number with Server Admin on another Mac, then rebooted the Xserve, and then re-entered the serial number again during the setup. Not a giant deal, but a tad annoying.

The server started and all of our settings had been migrated perfectly. All services were running that should be running. All OD users and their properties had been preserved. We tested to make sure web pages were being served. Everything seemed to be functioning properly, so we left, knowing that once the door closed behind us, we couldn’t get back in because TW had screwed up the card reader.

When we got back to Mike’s house, we discovered that nothing worked anymore, and we had no way to get back into the room because it was late and we doubted anyone from TW was going to be happy about helping us. Plus, our sites and personal e-mail hosted ont he Xserve aren’t that critical, so we left it down overnight.

This morning, the lady at TW informs us that she forgot to migrate our accounts from the old card server to the new one, and she apologizes and tells us it should be corrected within a few hours. Three hours later, Mike is able to get into the co-lo room.

The Xserve has kernel panicked. Somehow or another, both NICs had been assigned the same IP address (which wasn’t the case when the machine had been running Tiger) and that was enough to make the machine panic after a short but random amount of time. (I suspect there’s something more to it, but we wanted the server up ASAP so we didn’t go too deep.) Mike removed one NIC, assigned the correct IP to the internal NIC, and all was well again.

Until we noticed e-mail wasn’t being delivered. It turns out there’s a bug in Leopard server 10.5.0 where mail doesn’t get delivered to mailboxes defined by aliases in Workgroup Manager. And wouldn’t you know it, all the mailboxes on our server are WGM aliases. Luckily, this PDF at topicdesk.com explains how to implement Postfix aliases as a workaround until Apple fixes the problem. The error in the SMTP logs, by the way, for those of you who are curious, and for Google, was:

550-Mailbox unknown. Either there is no mailbox associated with this 550-name or you do not have authorization to see it.

So, after a TW screw-up and three Apple bugs, an upgrade and associated troubleshooting we should have had completed by the time we finished our pizza last night turned into roughly 24 hours downtime. I have truly wasted my life.

I wanted to write about this earlier in the week, but life got in the way. Being self employed is great, and at times it has kept me too busy to write or to collect my thoughts coherently enough to make writing possible. Others like Fake Steve Jobs and John Welch have beat me to the keyboard with a similar opinion, but that never stopped me before.

I remember, oh, a couple of months ago when frigtards (to borrow a phrase) sacrificed their dignity to wait in line during the hot summer sun, to wait in line while the rain poured down on them at night, with the hope… the wish!… that they’d be able to get their hands on at least one of the planet changing, magical devices that Christ himself probably was going to stand in line for. And after all their exposure to the elements, after standing and sitting and laying on hard concrete for days or weeks, after being made to look like complete asses in the media, after tying their self-identity to a transient piece of plastic and glass, it turned out that Apple had a shit-ton of the things and the line was completely pointless and stupid.

But the price… Completely worth it. The iPhone was the greatest creation of humanity, it could do no wrong. It cut a tin can as easily as a tomato. It was a dessert topping and a floor wax. It cleaned behind your toilet. It vacuumed pet hair off the furniture. It cooked your favorite dinner and gave you a hand job. Six hundred dollars was a bargain. Why, the frigtards in line were willing to pay twice that if they had to in order to get their hands on one of those precious few iPhones first. Not having one was unthinkable.

And then two months later Apple dropped the price 33%.

And the bitching began.

Shocker. Everyone was stunned. They couldn’t comprehend that technology gets cheaper over time. That’s never happened before! They had paid a kind of (finger quotes) “early adopter premium” (Not tax!*). They had been taken, Apple had ripped them off. The iPhone they proudly presented their plastic for two months ago in a frenzy lest they miss out on the technology event of a lifetime instantly wasn’t worth what they had spent. It was cheapened. Their special device, and subsequently, their personal specialness, wasn’t as special as it was 30 seconds ago. They voluntarily gave up their money in return for the exact goods they were promised and wanted so badly, and now they felt indignant enough to ask for some of it back.

I hope when Steve Jobs heard people wanted refunds, he rolled his eyes and groaned and said, “Fuck them.” That’s the Steve I like. Apple would have been completely correct to issue a PR-speak statement that said, “Too bad, you bought it already. Get over it, and yourself.” But that’s bad customer relations. And it furthers the action line in the press that arrogant Apple is a budding monster who will cheat consumers and take their money any way they can, ass-raping them if necessary without offering them a wet wipe afterwards. (In the press, all companies are bad until “proven” good by the press themselves.)

So Apple offered iPhone purchasers a $100 credit towards other products at the Apple Store. It was a good PR move, it throttled back the bitching a bit, and Apple gets more money from people who feel they were ripped off to begin with. Win-win-win.

I’m amused by all this. All of you obsessive iPhone frigtards have done your damnedest to make yourself look like… um… frigtards since MWSF last January. I realize you’re too dumb to let any of this disturb your sleep at night, but you really should re-evaluate your lives. Take some long walks in a scenic place. Listen to some classical music while sitting under a tree. Go outside at night and see the stars. Grab a big armful of the electronic gizmos you’ve purchased (instead of funding your retirement) and lost interest in and neglected and toss them into a dumpster. Play with a dog. Turn off Lord of the Rings or Star Trek or Nintendo of Playstation or whatever fantasy-based bullshit you’re obsessive-compulsively fixated with and join the real fucking world.

* A tax is something you pay involuntarily under threat of prison or worse. Nobody makes you buy iPhones the day they’re released.

I’ve read some of the point-counterpoint postings about the gentleman from Cox who asked about the Intel stickers during Apple’s iMac unveiling event Tuesday, and I want to add my little bit. I’m befuddled as to why Apple bothered to have a Q&A session after the event to begin with. The company is famous for responses that are scripted, terse, obvious, and otherwise answer-free. Why did they open the floor to possible questions they knew they had no intention of answering? What person in that room who was familiar with Apple would even bother to ask a question, since they can practically predict Apple’s answers? I don’t understand the point of the whole exchange.

From today’s MDJ concerning the InfoSecSellout idiocy:

InfoSecSellout had not released his worm into the wild, but hadn’t informed Apple about the vulnerability either, instead choosing to post about it on his own blog “to dispel notiions that Mac OS X is somehow more secure than Windows.”

And from David Maynor a year ago, in the MacBook wireless fiasco:

“We’re not picking specifically on Macs here, but if you watch those ‘Get a Mac’ commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something,” Maynor said.

Contrast those comments with this comment made by an analyst who discovered a security vulnerability with the iPhone:

The principal security analyst admits “It’s not the end of the world; it’s not the end of the iPhone” and it appears it hasn’t changed their enjoyment of the iPhone itself. Even the security firm’s founder states that while he may more cautious about using a random public WiFi network, “you’d have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands to get [the iPhone] away from me.”

iPhone good. Mac bad.

Any vulnerability found in the Mac is meant to punish Mac users for their smugness. Mac users are irrational cultists who have lost all sense of reason and, in typical mind-numbed robot fashion, worship Steve Jobs. Mac users and Macs deserve to suffer.

But the iPhone… It’s not the end of the world. A confirmed iPhone vulnerability is no big deal, versus two high profile unproven vulnerabilities that were hailed as the Mac apocalypse. Everything is both hunky and dory in the iPhone world, and I’ll keep using my iPhone in my coffin as I’m lowered into the ground.

Two pieces of hardware built by the same company, running variants of the same OS. One is at a perpetual brink of disaster that will prove once and for all that, ha ha ha, Macs suck just as much as Windows (a weird thing to gloat about) and you smug Mac bastards are about to get the punishment you deserve. The other is our special baby, and no matter what the problem, it’s not that bad and everything is just fine.

Sickening. Those who accuse Mac users of being biased and irrational are themselves equally as biased in favor of their own darling device. Don’t pretend to be impartial when you’re as attached to ideas and outcomes as the rest of us.

iPhatigue

Edit: I figured I better take a snapshot before this site disappears.