July 2011 Archives

Yay.

Thanks to the instructions found here I was able to convert my existing install of Leopard OS X Server to a virtual machine.

I deviated from the instructions somewhat in that instead of booting from a target disk, I went ahead and installed a new hard drive (drives are really cheap these days) and installed Snow Leopard on it. Then after booting into Snow Leopard, I used Disk Utility to create an image of my old OS, and restored that image with Disk Utility to the new drive I mounted with VMDKMounter. No third party tools required, not counting MacFUSE which VMWare Fusion installs.

After that I just had to tweak a couple of minor things, but things went well. Everything works!

With the new hard drive and Snow Leopard installed the machine seems a lot faster. Even the server VM seems faster than it was a physical machine.

I might eventually install Lion once revision 1 or 2 comes out, but for now I am really happy with the set up I have.

It's not like this blog has been a hotbed of creativity lately, but I expect this site to be offline sporadically over the coming weeks. I blame Apple.

You see, when I bought this Mac, I shelled out for the expensive server version of OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Looking back on it, I probably should have gotten the standard version and rolled my own apache and mysql install, but I digress. Anyways, when 10.6 (Snow Leopard) came out, I decided it wasn't worth the time, trouble, and, most of all, $500 to upgrade.

Then Lion came out and Apple decides not to offer a physical install disc anymore, and it looks like if I ever want to move forward I need to at least upgrade to 10.6 so that I can get the otherwise useless (to me) app store from which Apple is releasing their OS.

So, I'm going to do add a new drive to this machine and get prepped for an upgrade to 10.6.

I can't decide if I should just go right to Lion Server on this machine, or convert my old instance of Leopard Server to a VM and run that on Lion or Snow Leopard. I don't know what happens if you upgrade Snow Leopard client over Leopard Server and then go to Lion and then Lion Server. It sounds like a big pain in the ass, not to mention rife with pitfalls (if it is even supported), and a likely loss of configuration settings and data. I can't even really see what benefit there is to running Lion on a server. I don't care about the UI changes and I don't have a trackpad on this thing.

I'm leaning towards converting to a VM because it will make it possible to test the various scenarios while preserving the original image in case I need to roll back. It would also make things much more portable should I need to move to another OS, machine, disk or whatever. Plus you never really know if/when Apple will shitcan the server OS entirely leaving me unable to upgrade to latest client OS.

I'm kind of frustrated because this is the kind of shit I hoped to get away from by moving to Apple and OS X Server. Some of this is self inflected I guess for not dropping the cash for Snow Leopard Server, but they could have at least made it tempting for us cheapskates running small time stuff.

After the last match I said I wasn't going to shoot anymore matches this summer, but this was a steel challenge match which I hoped would be a lot quicker, and less intensive.

It was.

This was my first steel challenge match, but it's not really all that different from IPSC or IDPA in terms of shooting. I liked it. It was a good change of pace.

To me, it felt like pure speed shooting. There's no tactics, there's no analyzing the stage to figure out how to minimize reloads and find the best way to shoot it. Just a lot of shooting quickly. There are some longer shots on smaller targets, but there's no penalty for missing other than the time for the makeup, and I really didn't have that many misses anyways. That's not to say I was fast today, I wasn't, but I was pressing myself to go faster while trying to maintain hits.

I was shooting rimfire (S&W 2006) which is an advantage against the production guns. There's not much recoil to deal with and you don't have that big loud explosion going off in your face causing you to flinch. Plus, I swear mine has target seeking bullets. Several times I thought I had missed only to hear the steel ring. The sights did give me a bit of trouble. The rear notch is very narrow, and occasionally I would have a little trouble finding the front sight coming up from the low ready position.

One thing I liked was how you shoot the stage 5 times in a row. I've often shot stages in other formats where I knew if I got a chance to run it a couple more times I could cut a fair chunk of time off my initial run. It didn't always work that way in this match, but on a couple of stages I did get faster as I progressed.

Anyways, I liked it and will probably shoot a few more this year.

Not good.

I couldn't seem to find my front sight until about halfway through the third stage.

Sometime after 12 or 1 pm, it was so hot that I really wanted to leave, and I probably should have because I just was not into it.

I've made up my mind, no more matches if the expected high temperature is above 95. (It was 101 for this match.) So, I'm probably just shooting night matches for the rest of the summer.

The only good thing is I think I did ok on the classifier. It was kind of like 4 Bill Drills with 2 mandatory reloads, but you could only shoot 5 rounds per target and your hands were not over your head. You could hear people counting in the cadence of their shooting, maybe 10% of my squad got up there and just cranked out 5 shots in quick, even succession. That's how I did it, but I did have 2 C's.