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Sunday, January 16, 2005

 
8:22 PM: attack of the clones [#] [0]

i've just spent the weekend upgrading the studio computer, planet camino. the ultimate goal was to get it ready so that sven could get back to work on the lovecraft movie (due aug. 1!), but doing that required...

1. backing up all his data. which required ...
a. buying a new hard drive to hold all the backups, including his giant 200gb media drive (hal9000)
b. partitioning the new hard drive, something i had never done before
c. learning (and relearning and relearning, thanks, mph!) rsync
d. backing up, which in the case of hal9000, turned out to be full of crashes and hanging, so it -still- needs to get fully backed up (i'm hoping upgrading camino and freeing up 30gb of space on its hard drive will help the next round)
e. finding & installing new drivers for the firewire drives so the 10.3 install wouldn't destroy them as it has others

2. installing the os, which required...
a. the os disks (which we've had for, what, a year now? thanks, leopoldo!)
b. a conference chat between michaelmas, sven & mph
c. the first time camino didn't restart so i had to restart from cd, repair permissions & the disk
d. reinstalling after it still didn't restart
e. restarting after it hung again while trying to complete the stupid registration process
f. fixing a permissions issue that meant sven couldn't access any of his own files and many of his apps
h. moving sven's music to one of the external drive partitions so that he'd have more than 500mb of space left on his drive
h. re-configuring itunes
i. discovering that choosing "pause" during software update means you have to start all over again

3. getting it online, which required..
a. working out the options: would we get dsl at the studio, too? maybe use the studio dsl as our primary dsl and use camino as a server? would we get another airport hub? would airport express work? what about printing?
b. buying & installing an airport card, which for this computer meant we paid almost twice as much for an older card
c. buying, installing and configuring an airport xpress, which had its little moment of meh when sven's laptop confessor refused to print through it

all in all, this simple little project took over 6 months and several hundred dollars. and there's still some task cleanup, like a few more software updates, reconfiguring aliases between computers, fixing an odd system prefs pane, automating rsync backups and possibly getting another printer for the studio. but in the meantime, there are unspeakable horrors to animate.