10.5 Leopard – Display Servers on Desktop

By default mounted server file shares are no longer displayed on the desktop on Leopard as it was in Tiger. You can reactivate this behavior by enabling the Finder preference option labeled “Show these items on the Desktop: Connected servers”. To get to the Finder preferences, click any where on the desktop once and then on the top menu bar click: Finder | Preferences…

Finder preferences

OS X – How to Hide a Partition from the Finder

Go to the Terminal and issue the command:

sudo setfile -a V /Volumes/paritionName

where “partitionName” is the name of the partition or drive that you want to hide. This hides the partition from being seen in the Finder but you can still access it from the terminal such as with scripts.

10.5 Leopard Time Machine – Disable prompt when mounting new drives

Every time you mount a new drive in Leopard you get a prompt from Time Machine asking you if you want to use that drive for backups. You can prevent this prompt from occurring by issuing the following terminal command:

sudo defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES

Time Machine

Xserve MegaRAID – How to stop automatic consistency check on boot

If on reboot the server does a consistency check of the RAID, this process can take a very long time. It may take upwards of 8 or more hours. There isn’t really any indication an Xserve is doing a consistency check on reboot. What happens is the Xserve boots to a gray screen or if you try to hold down the option key the screen will just sit there like it is searching for bootable partitions. Every once in a while you will see the drive activity lights blink but other than that there is no real indication the consistency check is running.

If you want to abort the consistency check and prevent it from automatically running on the next reboot of the server you can boot from a Tiger/Leopard installation CD/DVD and then launch the terminal app from that. Then you need to manually start and then stop a consistency check. After you stop the consistency check, this resets whatever flag the Xserve reads which tells it to automatically run the consistency check on reboot. So now when you reboot the Xserve it should not try to run the consistency check and instead proceed with booting the server normally. Here are the commands to manually start and stop the consistency check:

megaraid -chkcon ld -start
megaraid -chkcon ld -stop

In the commands above, replace “ld” with the logical drive number of the RAID you want to check. You can get the logical drive number by running the command: megaraid -showconfig