Last week I rebuilt my work desktop, a 27" iMac, in an effort to get the new SSL VPN client from Cisco to work without causing a kernel panic. This was successful and so I repeated the process on my personal laptop as it also panciked after 30 seconds of connection via AnyConnect.
Rebuilding a TimeMachine supported work computer is one thing. Rebuilding your personal computer – home to all your pictues, documents, and other assorted bits of digital flotsam – is a vastly more stressful endevor.
I started by making a bootable copy of my hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Knowing that a complete copy of my hard drive would take hours I started the process late Saturday evening and went to bed after making sure it was running properly. Sunday morning the process had completed.
Next I verified that the clone was bootable. Restarting my MacBook Pro while holding down the Option key I was able to select which drive to boot from. The clone booted perfectly, if a bit slower than the regular hard drive. After rebooting again to the internal hard drive, I made sure I could mount the FireWire drive and access its contents.
Inserting a DVD I made for the iMac project, that contains a bootable copy of Mac OS X Lion, I rebooted the computer again, this time holding down the C key to boot from the optical drive. Using Disk Utility I crossed my fingers and formatted the drive. Having crossed the Rubicon I then spent the rest of Sunday and a good chunk of Monday rebuilding my machine.
The process, while time consuming, as been straight forward and relatively easy. As I noted yesterday, having a Github repository with my primary configuration files made getting much of my daily use environment reestablished far easier. Having learned from past experience I kept notes in Evernote as I went along – should I ever need to repeat this process I’ll have a recipe to follow.
Here then, for posterity, are my notes.
##Saturday, March 3, 2012
##Sunday, March 4, 2012
defaults write com.apple.dock.pinning -string [start | middle | end]
killall Dock
##Monday, March 5, 2012
##Tuesday, March 6, 2012
##Epilogue
There are a few more tasks yet to complete. I need to install Portal and Portal2 again, and set up Sibelius. And I’m still tweaking various fonts sizes, Growl notification settings, et cetera.
Wiping my hard drive and starting over has resolved the issue of kernel panics when running AnyConnect. However this solution didn’t solve the problem. I don’t know what was common to both the iMac and MacBook Pro that caused the crashes. I’ve got another MacBook Pro that also has Lion installed and it works perfectly with the new AnyConnect client. My best guess is that there was some low-level residue left over from installing/removing software, and or from migrating from Snow Leopard (and Leopard before that). It was a heavy handed solution that ends the problem.
(via: @benhemmersley)
Two times now in the past few days I have wiped out a hard drive and started over by reinstalling the operating system and all the applications and settings I wanted. Both times I benefited hugely thanks to a small Github repository I created for myself.
That repository holds many of the configuration files that some of my software tools use, the so-called “dotfiles”. With a simple git clone command followed by a couple of ln -s commands to link the files into place I was able to recreate my zsh environment, setup my global Git configuration and ignore files, configure Vim, and load my TextMate 2 properties.
Originally I created the dotfile repository as an exercise in being nerdy. After this past weekend that exercise has more than paid for itself.
tl;dr: Kernel panics caused by Cisco AnyConnect VPN client are tough to resolve. I had to format the drive and start over with a fresh copy of Mac OS X Lion.
My employer, Kansas State University, has recently improved the security of our network by upgrading from an IPSEC VPN to an SSL VPN. The new VPN required a new client and we were all given a link to the proper Cisco AnyConnect image to use. In my case the new client caused a kernel panic approximately 30 seconds after a connection was established.
Over the course of the past two weeks I have tried a number of things to resolve this situation. Some of these ideas were my own and others came from various system administrators and or the security team. The list is more or less in the order I attempted each fix.
I tried:
After each attempt my computer would again kernel panic after 30 or 31 seconds. To make this story more interesting, I actually was trying this on three different Macintosh computers. A 27" mid-2010 iMac, a 15" mid-2009 UniBody MacBook Pro, and a 15" 2008 MacBook Pro. All three machines were running the same build of OS X 10.7.3, build 11D50. By and large they have the same applications installed and are setup similarly. The 2008 MBP worked with AnyConnect, both the iMac and the 2009 MBP failed to work with the new VPN client.
As the iMac has a SSD boot drive I focused most of my testing effort on that machine – the reboot following each successive kernel panic was much faster than on the MacBook Pro’s spinning drive.
By examining the system.log leading up to the kernel panic one of the security guys identified a potential problem with Bonjour. The error message, shown below, seemed to indicate that the advertising of Bonjour services might be the issue.
mDNSResponder[17]: mDNSPlatformSendUDP sendto(9) failed to send packet on InterfaceID 0000000000000005 en0/6 to FF02:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:00FB:5353 skt 9 error -1 errno 13 (Permission denied) 140204455605799He also found a set of instructions that showed how to disable the Bonjour DNS Responder. Trying this actually seemed to work at first. My computer didn’t kernel panic at 30 seconds, although the connection timer stopped at 00:30. The kernel panic came when I tried to close the connection.
With no more ideas I decided to back up the drive and install a fresh copy of Lion. While I’ve only had this iMac for about a year, I migrated from the previous Mac Pro. This means there are files and settings that were created under Tiger, and which have migrated through Leopard and Snow Leopard on their way to Lion. In other words, the amount of cruft in the file system was unknown.
After burning a bootable DVD with the Lion installer the install process took about an hour. Once I complete the initial setup I downloaded the AnyConnect installer and installed the client. Lo and behold, the connection didn’t cause a kernel panic. Not at 30 seconds, not at 5 minutes. Not at all. (So far.)
Going forward my plan is to carefully re-add the software I need to my iMac, testing the VPN stability along the way. The ideal situation would be to discover some incompatible software or setting – something that I can rectify on the MacBook Pro, avoiding the need to back it up, wipe its drive, and re-install Lion.
This morning I had a consultation with the orthopedic surgeon regarding my right elbow. Four weeks ago I injured it pulling myself up out of a reclined reclining chair. While some range of motion has returned, the healing process has been slow and therefore concerning.
The appointment today was good. The short answer is “synovial inflammation”.
The long version goes like this.
I have lots of arthritis calcifications in my elbow. The bone in your upper arm, the humerus, has a niftily little notch where the partial socket on the ulna fits when your arm is straight. On my right arm that notch is filled in (and then some) with calcifications. This is likely what has prevented me from straightening my arm for most of the last 20 years.
There are also calcifications on the rim of the partial socket on the ulna that may be interfering with a full range of motion.
The doctor (whom both Sibylle and I liked) explained that there is a difference between “normal” and “functional”. What I have had for a very long time now is an arm that is fully functional but has less than normal range of motion. Medically you can have down to just 100º of range of motion and still be considered functional. Until I hurt my arm four weeks ago I’d guess I had close to 160º of range of motion – I couldn’t touch my shoulder and not quite fully extend my arm.
Since injuring my arm four weeks ago I’ve lost about 30º when I extend my arm. If I hold both arms out to my sides, palms up, my left arm is parallel to the floor and my right arm looks like I’m midway through directing traffic. Trying to straighten my arm further hurts.
The doctor wants to approach this conservatively. We are going to medicate it with twice-a-day does of a 500mg of Naproxen for 30 days, and I’m going to have PT on the arm starting Friday. Hopefully the PT will include some ultrasound to reduce inflammation of the soft tissues involved.
I go back in six weeks for a follow-up. If at that time I’m still sore and still haven’t returned to my pre-injury functionality, then we’ll consider surgery. It is possible to perform an arthroscopic procedure on the elbow and “burr” away the calcifications. However, as the doctor put it, “there are a 100 ways I can make your arm worse and only a couple that will make it better.”
So, pain meds, PT, and wait and see.
As for the “you have a weird elbow” comments from my primary care physician, it seems that she was misreading the x-ray. The images are of a three-dimensional structure layered onto a two-dimensional film. With arthritis calcifications obscuring some details and out-right altering the appearance of others, she simply mis-interpreted the image.
A few weeks ago I discovered a new site called Swipe the Linen where people can submit an image of their iPhone home screen, along with a short write up of the apps they use. The image if my home screen that I took just three days after getting my iPhone was published today.
Film of an Eagle Owl flying directly at the camera. Seeing those talons open just before the raptor latches onto the bait gives me pause.
(via: @simplebits)
After reading Continuous Deployment for iOS Apps I decided to setup a Jenkins continuous integration server of my own, and to configure it to build my tiny little iOS projects. Rather than use a script to trigger the build I used the XCode plugin for Jenkins to manage the build. In addition to the Xcode plugin I’m using the Git plugin so I can build from Github.
Here are the steps I took to get this working.
##Install Jenkins
Homebrew is my preferred package installation tool and since there is a Jenkins formula for brew I used it to install the server.
$ brew install jenkins
##Start Jenkins
$ java -jar /usr/local/Cellar/jenkins/1.447/lib/jenkins.jar
##Add plugins
By default Jenkins is configured to run at localhost:8080. Open Jenkins in your browser and click on the Manage Jenkins link on the Jenkins dashboard. On the Manage Jenkins page that is returned click on the Manage Plugins link. On the Plugins Manager page, select the Available tab. Scroll down the list and select the Git and Xcode plugins. Click Install without Restart. Once Jenkins restarts you are ready to proceed.
##Specify Location of Xcode
With the release of Xcode 4.3 Apple has changed the location of Xcode. Previously it was in /Developer. Now it appears as an application in /Applications. I ran the xcode-select command to specify the new location of the executables.
$ sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
You can verify your configuration (if you are using Xcode 4.3) like so:
$ xcode-select -print-path && xcodebuild -version
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
Xcode 4.3
Build version 4E109
$
##Create a new Jenkins project
I created a “freestyle” project for my build and named the build after my project. Under the Source Code Management section I selected Git, and I filled in the path using my Github repository URL. This is the same URL you would use when cloning the project from the command line.
Under Build Triggers I added two conditions. I set a periodic build to occur once a day, at 12:05 pm. Build periodically uses crontab style notation, so the configuration looks like
05 12 * * *
I also selected Build when a change is pushed to Github. Giving the nature of my development process (evenings and weekends) this is probably the more reasonable long term choice.
I selected Xcode for the add build step drop down. This entry is available after adding the XCode plugin. I checked the Clean before build? option, and left all other options alone. My first builds failed as I don’t have a paid Apple Developer membership and the signing certificate that comes with that membership. By default the Xcode plugin tries to build your application for a device, and that requires a signing certificate. By adding the following path to the SDK setting I was able to specify the Simulator SDK for my build.
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator5.0.sdk/
With the Simulator SDK specified by build succeeds.
##Future Benefits
Having a CI server setup and running for the student level exercises I am currently completing might seem like overkill. But I like the level of maturity having this process in place brings. At a glance now I can see which projects are building and which are broken. Once I have more developed applications that make use of unit testing, having a CI server and process in place will really start to pay off.
A wonderful space for kids. We need one of these (or more) in the United States.
Here’s a great quote that I just ran across in this wonderful rant about Rails. The quote is by why the lucky stiff.
when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.