Installing Lion on the Mac Mini Server (Intel Core Duo)

I purchased two Mac Mini Servers a while back to run some VM's, etc... I no longer have a need for one of them and I was pressed to see if the standard version (non-Server) would run on the device. Now, just to note... the install media for Mac OS X "workstation" will not install on this box via CD/DVD. There is a mechanism in the installer which inquires what hardware OS X is being installed on, and that inquiry is not good ;-)... So, with a new Firewire cable and some goofy procedure... I now have Mac OS X Lion running on my Mac Mini Server 1TB.

Installing OS X Lion "workstation" on a Mac Mini Server....

What you will need:

Mac Book Pro (or another Mac with Firewire)

Mac Mini Server 1TB - Intel Core Duo

Dual-Ended Firewire Cable (not common)

OS X DVD (10.6 or later)

OS X Lion Disc Image (download from AppStore - yes.. it ends up on your drive)

Backup your Mac Book Pro (I have no idea how messed up things can get).

Make sure everything is powered off, initially.

Plug-in the firewire cable into both the MBP and the MacMini.

Boot your Mac Book Pro normally.

Power on the MacMini while holding down the T key and wait for the Firewire symbol to appear on the screen (to boot to Target Disk Mode).

-- Your Mac Mini will show up as a drive on your MBP.

Open Disk Utility.

"Erase" whatever configuration your current MM drives are in. I do this by creating a new/dummy partition.

Create a RAID set and add the 2 drives. For this experiment I created a RAID 0 striped RAID set. This step will take about 5 minutes to complete.

Open the diskimage InstallESD.dmg and double click Install Mac OS X Lion

Select the Orange disk with the Firewire symbol. The installer will complain that some of the features will not be available. Whatever... Click Continue. The installer will take about 5 minutes copying files to the MM drive(s).

The system will then reboot and take another 25 minutes copying stuff to the drive.

IMPORTANT: (at least I believe this is important). The installer will complete and reboot. Power off the MBP before it is able to reboot. Then power off the MM. Then power on the MM normally. The MM should continue the installation.

NOTE:

I'm pretty certain I don't understand the logic behind a few things:

- why does the workstation installer not work on the Mac Mini Server?

The installer literally checks the hardware type and flat out "fails" the install

- why does Mac OS X Lion only come in a download and not a physical media format?

This isn't the most ridiculous computer task I have attempted, but it is certainly not the easiest either.

PXE boot a LiveCD image

Summary: I have wanted to build a kickstart environment which hosted a "rescue CD" or LiveCD to allow you to boot over the network after you blew your stuff up and needed to repair a few things. Today I have worked through a method of doing so, with the help of the people who published a succinct script with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor. (the script will be at the bottom of this post - if I have somehow not followed the GPL, please let me know and I will correct whatever is necessary) NOTE/Warning: The boot will fail due the initrd being too large (645mb). I'm not sure how to proceed. This procedure worked for RHEVh, because it is quite a bit smaller. Hopefully I can report back with progress on this? :-$ Procedure: download your LiveCD image to /export/isos/RESCUE/Fedora-16-i686-Live-Desktop.iso # cd /var/tmp # vi livecd-iso-to-pxeboot (populate the file with the script shown below) # chmod 754 ./livecd-iso-to-pxeb...

"Error getting authority: Error initializing authority: Could not connect: No such file or directory (g-io-error-quark, 1)"

"Error getting authority: Error initializing authority: Could not connect: No such file or directory (g-io-error-quark, 1)" One issue that may cause this to arise is if you managed to break your /etc/fstab We had an engineer add a line with the intended options of "nfsvers=3" but instead added "-onfsvers=3" and it broke the system fairly catastrophically.

P2V using dd for KVM-QEMU guest

Preface: I have certainly not exhaustively tested this process. I had a specific need and found a specific solution that worked. Situation: I was issued a shiny new laptop running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (with Corp VPN, certs, Authentication configuration, etc...) The image was great, but I needed more flexibility on my bare metal. So, my goal was to P2V the corporate image so I could just run it as a VM. * Remove corporate drive and install new SSD * install corp drive in external USB-3 case * Install RHEL 7 on new SSD * dd old drive to a disk-image file in a temp location which will be an image which is the same size as your actual drive (unless you have enough space in your destination to contain a temp and converted image) * convert the raw disk-image to a qcow file while pushing it to the final location - this step should reduce the disk size - however, I believe it will only reduce/collapse zero-byte blocks (not just free space - i.e. if you de...

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