Category: Technology

Between my wife and I we have 3 Macs. She has a Blackbook and I have a Macbook Pro and a Whitebook from work. The two Macbooks have been connecting just fine to our Linksys router for quite some time. I don’t have any sort of encryption, as our nearest neighbors are too far out of range. I’ve setup MAC address filtering and disabled SSID broadcasts. Nothing too fancy. Well, as of late I’ve been having issues with the Macbook Pro. I could start the machine up, connect to the router and surf for about 5 minutes. Then my conneciton would drop to nil and the Airport icon would show zero bandwidth. It would also choke if I put the MBP to sleep and latter tried to reconnect. So I tried everything to fix this problem. Fixed permissions, reinstalled security updates, updated the router’s firmware, changed channels on the router, updated the OS and everything else you could possilbly think of. Except for one thing.

I didn’t reset the router back to it’s default settings.

So tonight, after literally a week of banging my head against a wall (Cause after all the 2 Macbooks were working. Why wasnt’ the Pro? What is going on? It doesn’t make sense! AHHHHHHHH!!!) I’ve finally fixed my wireless issue. I’m now slowly tweaking the router, adding the MAC filtering and tweaking other various settings. We’ll see how long this lasts so cross your fingers.

Sidenote: Along my journey into wireless hell I came across a very ‘perplexing’ entry in both the system and console logs:

Jun 19 21:41:05 Chris-Computer mDNSResponder: getifaddrs ifa_netmask for fw0(7) Flags 8863 Family 2 169.254.129.184 has different family: 0
Jun 19 21:41:05 Chris-Computer mDNSResponder: SetupAddr invalid sa_family 0

I have no idea what this means. It’s talking about DNS entries for the Firewire port or some such nonsense. But in the Network Preference Pane I don’t have the Firewire port active. Curiouser and curiouser!

I’m (was) having some difficulty with my network connection on my Mac. This is an unrelated error, but I found it digging in Console.

2007-02-22 11:10:26.479 Mail[428] Loaded Letterbox bundle
2007-02-22 11:10:26.479 Mail[428] Posing…
2007-02-22 11:10:26.821 Mail[428] Bwahaha! I am a LetterboxExpandingSplitView, and I shall always be vertical!

Many thanks to Aaron Harnly the developer of Letterbox for such a humorous log

This process was discovered researching how to Zen a Boot Camp partition. Those instructions can be found here.

One of the concerns when trying to deploy a Zen image is the HAL. Our base image has a standard single processor ACPI. However some of our new machines are dual-core, and as such need the ACPI updated. Corey Webb, our Zen guru, created an add-on image to swap out this ACPI to Multiprocessor. I stumbled across this when I was having an issue with an IBM T60 that wouldn’t wake from sleep. Thinking this might help our success with imaging the Intel Macs I applied the add-on and was met with great success.

Taking this one step further, I noticed that my Parallels VM of just a standard Windows XP install had a ‘Standard PC” HAL. I asked Corey to create an add-on image that would swap out the HAL with ‘Standard PC’. That’s it!

Just boot your VM off the zen imaging CD, pull down your base image and an add-on to replace the HAL. You’re done. Once you’re up and running you can send ctrl+alt+del to login from the VM menu in Parallels. After installing the Parallels Tools (an MSI that could be deployed to the maching via Zenworks) you can press (in this order, holding each one until they are all depressed) alt then ctrl then fn then delete.

See previous endeavors

Zen and Intel Mac Part I
How to Zen an Intel Mac Part II
How to Zen a Parallels VM

This week we’ve discovered some additional noes about getting a Zen image onto (into?) a Boot Camp partition. The process is well documented but is rather time consuming. The 3 biggest parts are 1) swapping out the ACPI HAL from our base with a multi-core ACPI. 2) The boot.ini pointing to the 3rd partition on the Mac HD 3) Using the sync tool in rEFIt to sync the mbr after imaging.

Hopefully in the near future I’ll be able to test if pulling down an image directly is possible. (img rp $PROXYADDR //$PROXYADDR/baseimg.zmg a1:p3 + an add-on image with Multiprocessor ACPI is a hint)

Here’s a basic rundown:

From Start to Finish

1) Prepare the Intel Mac
a) Bootcamp, NetRestore, rEFIt

2) Prepare the add-on images:
a) Create an add-on image for XP drivers, correct boot.ini (partition 3) and correct muli-core ACPI

3) Prepare the Windows Disk Image
a) Install the Zen base and add-on images using the ZenWorks Imaging tools. Shutdown and boot into Target mode
b) Create an NTFS master disk image (base.ntfs) using NetRestore Helper

4) Restore the NTFS disk image to the Bootcamp partition

Future Deployment

Once you have a base NetRestore image, you can simply follow the following directions.

1. Install Bootcamp on the Mac meant for deployment.
2. Partition the HD as you like.
3. Restart into OSX and restore your base NetRestore image to the Boot Camp partition.
4. Install rEFIt and restart
5. Resync the MBR if needed and boot into Windows
6. Let sysprep run.

Additional Notes

You can’t use a Macbook as the main imaging machine. The keyboard does not work with the Zen imaging CD. Nor does an external keyboard. This limits you to an intel iMac, Mac Mini, or Mac Pro.

Once the XP drivers have been installed you can press the following key command for Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

Fn+ctrl+option (alt)+command (Apple)+delete

To right click, after the XP drivers are installed press the following key command:

Right command (Apple)+Trackpad button