PhatBoyG.com

Tonight I upgraded the drive in my MacBook Pro from the Fujitsu 160GB that came with it to a new 320GB 7200 RPM Hitachi. I was in desperate need of space (thanks to VMware Fusion and my need for 3-4 virtual machines) and felt with the new 7200 RPM drives now available that it was time to pull the trigger.

The install went smooth and quick, thanks to the guides at iFixit (and others). I used SuperDuper to clone the internal drive to the new drive installed in an external USB enclosure. The process went quickly (maybe 3 hours to copy over 120GB of actual data) and soon after I had the upgrade complete.

Here at the details of the upgrade:

Hitachi HTS723232L9A360:
  Capacity:	298.09 GB
  Model:	Hitachi HTS723232L9A360
  Revision:	FC4OC30F
  Serial Number:	xxxxxxx
  Native Command Queuing:	Yes
  Queue Depth:	32
  Removable Media:	No
  Detachable Drive:	No
  BSD Name:	disk0
  Mac OS 9 Drivers:	No
  Partition Map Type:	GPT (GUID Partition Table)
  S.M.A.R.T. status:	Verified
  Volumes:
Macintosh HD:
  Capacity:	297.77 GB
  Available:	186.59 GB
  Writable:	Yes
  File System:	Journaled HFS+
  BSD Name:	disk0s2
  Mount Point:	/

Hopefully that means all is well (I really have no clue). Everything seems to work so far as it did before so I’m a happy camper!

Today was another day in the adventures of Leopard OSX. Since upgrading to Leopard I’ve tried to be a loyal Apple fan boy. But I have to admit some things are not perfect. This latest discovery has nothing to do with Leopard, however, it has to do with the way Leopard follows Internet standards. You see, there is some new way to resolve domain names whereby a SRV record is requested instead of a plain old A record.

Apparently this is to distinguish well known services (like HTTP, SMTP, etc.) from standard old server names. This is to allow a single domain like hotmail.com to use different servers for services on different ports but with a single domain name. For example, asking for port 25 on hotmail.com would return a different IP address than asking for IMAP (yeah, that was a joke on hotmail). Asking for port 80 (HTTP) would return yet another IP address. All with the same domain name.

It seems that Leopard is uses this new method and certain DNS implementations do not handle it properly so it times out and falls back to the legacy A request. Well, neither of my D-Link routers DNS Relay implementation seems to handle it properly so it wasn’t working well at home. I smell a firmware upgrade at some point, but for now my DHCP server is handing out the ISP (cox.net) DNS addresses and all is well in Leopard land again.

If you are having any of these slow-resolving name issues, etc. you might give this fix a shot.

Scott Bellware gave a shout out to Show Your Spaces so I’m chiming in with how I’m taking advantage of Leopard’s new Spaces feature.

Yes, Virginia, that is a full-screen Visual Studio 2005 running under Windows 2003 Server in the bottom left — hallelujah!