Here’s my situation, and I’m sure there are many other people that are in the same position as I am. One of my clients is a small to medium sized business and they use Macs. After I started working for them, I think they started to see I could help them with a lot of business tasks. After talking with me about their goals they decided to buy a couple of Mac Mini Servers.

I’m excited at the chance to set these up for them and I even bought one for myself which is already working out to be quite a time saver (well, not exactly at the moment, but it will be.) I’m a smart guy, I worked as a developer at Microsoft for many years. I knew I could do this server thing and it’s been a tough learning curve, but it will be fine. My main problem is that I’m having a hard time figuring out what an OS X Server network is “supposed” to look like.

With a Windows Server network, at least the one we had at Microsoft, you log in to each computer as your domain user, it verifies your password via the network, sets up a local home directory on the computer and you’re done. Whether the network is there or not, you can log in. Windows Server isn’t big on network home drives. People have tons of storage on their workstation, it’s too expensive to ignore that.

OS X Server is just the opposite, and it doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. They’re favorite thing is the network user with a network home. This is great because you can log in anywhere and your files are available to you. The problem is, what about the terabyte of storage on the local workstation that the user uses everyday? Apple doesn’t have any suggestions here, but I guess you have to educate the user on how to store things locally, because they aren’t going to have that much storage space on the network (for small businesses).

I found out how to have a home folder created locally on each computer a user logs into, which is kinda good. But what I would really like is some sort of integrated solution where a user has both network and local stuff and the idea of that is fully supported.

Also, the computer you logged into doesn’t remember you or your password if you have a network account. It might store some files for you, but if the network goes down, nobody in the whole organization can log in. For a small business with a part time administrator, this is not an option.

Of course, you can choose to have the users have a true local machine account (not managed by server) and a network account (managed by the server) and then log into services while logged into their local account, but this isn’t really supported either. These are truly two separate accounts and nothing is going to confuse users more than having two accounts and two passwords, especially if you do as some suggest and give the accounts the same username, which is totally possible. My clients would freak knowing that one username had two passwords that had to be changed separately in separate places.

So now I’m looking into creating mobile accounts. My understanding is that then the computer will remember you so you can still log in if the network is down. I can minimize syncing to certain folders and train the users that these folders are “network” folders. I can also train them to use their local drives for the files they only need on a single computer.

I’m so curious as to how Apple has their network set up. Does every user have two logins and passwords? Do they all have network accounts but aren’t able to log in if the network goes down? Do they all have mobile accounts for the reasons that I think they are a good idea? How do they make the most of both network and local storage?

The thing that’s most disappointing about Mac OS X Server is that it seems like this issue is the elephant in the middle of the room that nobody’s talking about. But it really needs to be talked about? Real businesses don’t just have library terminals set up everywhere. So how is it supposed to look?

If you have any knowledge that can help me find my way, please share it in a comment! Or if you just want to add to my rant, please feel free to do so!

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been taking a crash course in Mac OS X Server administration. I bought a Mac Mini Server and ever since I’ve been reading as much of the server documentation as I could and installing and reinstalling and staying up way to late every day.

I reinstall now about once every two days, and each time, I try to maintain as much of the previous installation’s settings as possible. For instance, last time I exported and reimported DNS and Open Directory (via Workgroup Manager) information successfully.

I keep network home directories, time machine backups, and mysql data on the second drive in the Mac Mini Server so that I can do clean installs without destroying that data.

As I’m geting more used to using the tools such as Server Admin and Workgroup Manager, I’m using Server Preferences less and less. This happened organically. Server Preferences has a simpler friendlier interface, but I’m finding that it may be a “false friend” as it sometimes does more than you’d like when you want to have finer control over your server.

After my most recent clean install, I enabled the AFP service in Server Admin and I was removing the default shares and adding my preferred shares on the other drive. I also went ahead and shared the network Time Machine disk. But when I started the AFP service, none of my computers that had previously been using Time Machine on the network acknowledged that the drive was there.

I went into my iMac and I re-selected the drive. It started a fresh backup but in the root directory of the drive instead of in Shared > Backups where it was previously backing up. I immediately stopped that backup and went to investigate.

For all previous installations I had enabled network Time Machine in Server Preferences, not Server Admin. So I went to Server Preferences and then to Time Machine and it told me something strange. It said that “File Sharing” was not turned on. But it clearly was. My network home directory was working fine and I had already started and stopped a backup using network Time Machine.

Well that’s it, clearly File Sharing is a different concept from AFP. First of all, File Sharing will share things by default using SMB and AFP, which at least at this point, I don’t care that much about. I can always enable SMB when I need it.

Also, when you start network Time Machine using Server Preferences it creates the directory structure Shared > Backups on the drive you select. Then it only shares the Backups folder. So when you go in Server Admin to do the same thing, you only want to share the Backups folder and not the whole drive. Once I did this my remaining computers woke up, recognized that the Time Machine drive was now present, and continued to back up as if I had never reinstalled OS X Server. This is just what I wanted.

Also, for the computer where I had changed the backup drive, I now selected the new share and it also recognized its old backup file and continued with its backups as if I had not reinstalled. This was a pleasant surprise.

So now my server is set so that “File Sharing” is off and AFP is on, and that’s fine with me. Hopefully I can forget that Server Preferences exists and it will be one less tool to have to worry about.

One reason I really wanted to run my own business was to be able to do business and live my life honestly. I have a very honest way of working with my customers, they know I can only give so much time and it may take some time to get what they want. But it works out, because they are happy with the results.

While working on a project there are various phases in the development cycle, but one that has never been written in books is the phase I like to call, “relaxation and reflection”. I go through periods where I work very hard and kind of exhaust myself. Then I need to stop work for at least a few days and just think about what I’ve done. Make sure things are fitting together correctly and heading in the right direction.

Just to fly right in the face of traditional development cycles, I find this “relaxation and reflection” phase needs to happen, among other times, right before the code is placed into production? Yes, that’s right. Right when the customer wants it, right when the tension’s the highest, it’s time to take a break. How can that be?

Well, if you want the code to work, and you want to enjoy the maintenance cycle, and you want to enjoy your life, and you want your customers to be happy, then you need to make sure you’ve done the right thing before you throw it out into the wild.

This is just plain true, but I don’t expect IT departments or software development companies to understand it any time soon. This is because they are run by managers, and managers never really understand anything, so it doesn’t even make a bit of sense to take the time to understand things. Understanding things is not what they do. There’s nothing for them to understand, it’s all about deadlines to them. As long as something crappy that mostly works is put out on time, they get their bonus.

This is how small consulting companies can come into the game and thrive, by hitting large companies in their soft spot: quality.

It’s to the point now where people don’t expect to ever get quality, so if you can provide it, especially at a reasonable price, that’s really going to work for your business. It sounds obvious, which makes it even more strange that it doesn’t happen that often.

This is an important skill because I can’t focus on a single task for an entire day. In fact, it’s very much the opposite of that. What I learned is a new method of focusing on a goal, while totally lowering the intensity. I raise the focus on a single goal, but lower the stress and pressure.

What I do is look for the next sub-task in the larger task that I’m fully capable of grasping in its entirety. Then regardless of time constraints or pressure, I do that task at a reasonable (easy) pace. So if I have 200 (or some unknown large number) sub-tasks related to the project I am currently working on and 300 (or some unknown large number) sub-tasks unrelated to the current project, I forget all of that and focus on the next easy and logical sub-task that is directly related to the project.

For instance, if the next most logical thing is just to create a directory, but creating a directory feels like just such a miniscule part of what I need to do, I create the directory, enjoy myself while I do it, and don’t worry about the other 499 things at all or the time pressure.

Now, when I say it, it sounds so simple. In fact, it is simple once you can do it, but to change one’s perspective to be able to adopt such a work style is what takes a little time. Also, with the work I do there are infinite tasks to be done, many of which will never actually be done, so it took some time to get used to that idea enough to be able to let go.

What’s nice is that things actually go a lot, and I mean a lot, faster once I can do this. I can actually finish the larger tasks way faster than I thought I would be able to. At the end, there are still infinite tasks to complete, but at least I had fun while completing the last one, I actually completed it, and I know I will have fun completing the next one.

One of the things you avoid with this work style is “branching”. That is, you’re working on some php code, and you suddenly realize you could use a new debugging tool, so you start to work on that, and then you realize you need to clean up some files, so you start to do that, and then you realize you need to send an email. That gets you nowhere. Branching is strictly forbidden. If something is truly necessary then it isn’t branching, but if it isn’t necessary it’s not allowed. At the end of the day, you may need a new debugging tool, but that’s another task you can choose to focus on at another time.

When you have your own business, you have to think. You literally don’t have time to blog or code 48 hours a day, but sometimes your plan is to do just that, and having that much time really would be helpful. Thinking you do have that kind of time is not going to work out, so you need to be able to be productive and happy until you figure that out.

Right now, I want to work, but I’m still unpacking and lately the desire to get things sorted out has been taking priority. Of course, if I don’t work, I don’t eat, but somehow “life” is still getting a higher priority than work. Weird.

I didn’t see the woman who “helped” me, and didn’t want to. All I saw was nice Apple Store employees. Aging hippies, hopeless nerds, those are my friends. I started to feel better.

However we did spend about a half hour in there wandering around and despite a ton of employees I realized nobody asked us if we needed help. We didn’t, so maybe it’s actually that they’ve learned to read body language better.

It’s interesting that in the entire store there was only one Mac Pro, one Apple TV, one Mac Mini, one 24″ display, and one 30″ display. Isn’t that odd? I was pointing that out and saying you could tell a lot about Apple’s future direction by looking at what they have in the store. MacBooks, MacBooks, MacBooks.

I sort of long for the days when there was a mini theater in the store, and a kids area. But, I guess times change.

So I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Apple gives out all sorts of discounts, so many that I can’t really keep track of them. I just kind of know the ones I’m eligible for and stick to those. I find that Apple will usually make you jump through a couple small hoops and then gladly give you the discount you qualify for and everyone’s happy.

Now before I start the story, I want to say I’m very conscious of not being a douche in these situations, because I only want discounts I obviously qualify for. I don’t try to get anything else or convince them I’m a student or anything. I’m not like begging for discounts or anything, I just know the offers available, as if I had a coupon. When you buy as many Macs as I do, you just know the drill, you’re not trying to give anyone a hard time.

My friend had arrived before me and had picked out his MacBook Pro and was just about to pay. So when I showed up, I started mentioning the discounts he might qualify for. First I mentioned he was the owner of a medium sized business and would like to have his business purchases tracked by Apple as such. Now, this won’t automatically qualify you for a discount, but it will sort of grease the wheels and it’s a good way to get future discounts. Sometimes, however, this will get you a discount on its own, so it’s good to mention. In this case, they didn’t offer any discounts, so that was fine, we’d still sign up for the future benefits.

So the next obvious discount that everyone should get is that Apple will match the price at Amazon. It’s like a 3% discount, it’s not big deal, but it still pays for your lunch afterward. So I mentioned this to the girl helping us and she’s like, “I don’t know the Amazon price, you’re free to see if it’s different.” Then she sort of pushes the computer my way, not in a “hint-hint, this is how you get the discount” nice way, but in a “I hate you for making this difficult” mean way.

I’m thinking, “whatever” and look up the price on amazon and it’s a 3% discount just as I expected. No big deal. But then, this girl is like, “How do I see if this configuration matches, and how do I see the specs for this machine? How do I know that this one is new?” So we look through the site to get her what she needs, but I’m getting annoyed because it’s really not necessary. They knew before I even got there exactly what the Amazon price was, making me look it up on the internet is just due diligence. There’s no need for this drama. So she finds what she “needs” and says she needs to go check on the discount.

I’m fine with that and just expect her to come back and give us the discount, no big deal, they usually have to get management approval to give these basic discounts regardless. But no, she comes back and says, “Well, we can’t give you the discount because this Mac comes with Leopard and the one you’re buying here comes with Snow Leopard, so it’s not the same.”

Now, you realized what happened right? She went to talk to her manager or something, and as you would expect, they had the Amazon deal memorized by heart and had known about this little loophole well before I came into the store. It’s not like they investigated and found this.

At this point, I’m kind of upset, because I feel like I’m being jerked around. This is a tiny little loophole. So I say, “Oh come on, you know Amazon’s going to be offering this same computer with Snow Leopard for the same price tomorrow or next week.” And she says, “Well, then you’re free to come back next week and buy it.”

I look at my friend. Pause. And breath.

After that, she said, “We don’t just go handing out discounts, you know.”

So if it were up to me, I would have walked out, not because of the discount which was really small anyway, because of the attitude. What she could have said was, “You know what, I know we normally give these kind of discounts, but because of the economy management is all over us and we just can’t give them out right now. I know, it’s kind lame if you’re used to getting them.” I would have been fine with this. Like I said, I don’t want anything special, I just want the obvious Apple approved discounts that are available. Nothing more.

But my friend needed the computer for his business, it was actually a blocking issue for him, so we just bought the computer.

What was really off putting about this experience was that from the moment I got there, this girl had an attitude. I just ignored it until it became impossible. The funny thing is there was this other employee standing next to us watching the whole thing. I don’t know if he congratulated her or critiqued her after we left. But here’s the deal, I was nice the whole time and aside from just trying to present her with logic, I didn’t argue with her. She was downright rude and made it very clear at every turn that she had no respect for me.

My friend and I had lunch afterward, and he told me another part of the story. Apparently my friend told a different male employee, “Yeah, we’ve made a card game for the iPhone.” The guy said, “Well it better be good, because there’s a lot of them.” Odd. Just so you know, it’s not just any card game and last week it hit the million sold mark. Maybe Apple needs to raise the bar for their employees.

I hate that AdSense only reports on what channels have had activity, not on the actual ads. It’s ridiculous, just show me which ads were seen and clicked. Instead I end up creating one channel per ad, which is just a pain in the ass, and then things still don’t ad up. For instance it will show 100 ads have been clicked but only 99 clicks have happened on any available channel. So where did the other click come from?

The way these ads are set up just begs for people to stop using them. I think of them as what I use as an experiment or when I can’t think of anything else. We’ll see what happens.

Now that I’m starting to understand my own scheduling needs, things are running more and more smoothly and I just love it. There’s a lot less stress, but tons more productivity, and tons more happiness. I can honestly say now that having a job held me back, I am someone who needs to have my own company to progress at the rate I want. I’ve know this from the first job I had, but with no experience I didn’t feel comfortable going out on my own. But with the experience, it’s pretty darn comfortable and a lot of fun. I know my customers can’t appreciate everything I do, just like my manager’s couldn’t. But customers appreciate things more anyway. I am actually making their business run smoother and work better and they definitely can see that. Ironically, in spite of that being the goal, one doesn’t often do that as an employee.

Just this morning I was thinking about how long it should take to complete a new blog entry. The actual answer depended on the kind of blog entry and on what I expected in return for creating that blog entry. What I’ve found with blogs is that you can get into a habit of posting even though your goals aren’t being met. Or you can get into a habit of spending more than your allotted time on them, usually because you haven’t thought about what that allotted time actually is.

If you generalize this to all tasks, not just blog entries, you can start to see how employees don’t often think about it. Even a higher level manager with a budget and a time limit often doesn’t think about whether that’s the right budget or the right time limit. Even executives often run on autopilot choosing the next obvious task without really thinking if it’s the right one. This is how companies go out of business, which they often do, at least the modern version of going out of business, selling or restructuring.

When you own your own business though, the metrics are always right in your face. Can you pay your rent? Are you happy with how much you’re working? Do you feel you’re getting the return on investment you desire out of your work? If not, then it’s time to start rethinking things and this can happen on a daily basis, or even more often. The questions are tough, and correct answers are required.

Employees don’t need to ask those questions because the answers for an employee are usually constant, and they can’t usually change the answers anyway, except to find another job, and even then it’s probably going to be mostly more of the same.

I love it. These challenges are what I’ve been waiting for. But I can’t help but think that most other people wouldn’t like it at all.

I also like that I schedule my time, and this works out great for me. I have a dog and I have no guilt from being at work all day because the most I’m away is four or five hours, usually less, and he’s fine with that.

But the trade off is that I just sent out a bill to a customer and it’s very late. I spent most of this evening working, because I was working on finishing up a milestone of sorts, and just wanted to get it out of my hair. But those last minute details always take longer than you think. You know you’re essentially done but it’s still 3 more hours of work until you stop working. Here are some of the things I have to do when I’m “done”:

• Code review and check in code.
• Create tags for new versions of themes and plugins.
• Copy new code to secondary environment, production or customer test environment.
• Investigate and fix any weird bugs between my environment and theirs (often due to accidental hard coding of values.)
• Write up customer facing descriptions of all the tasks I did for the latest work.
• Create an invoice.
• Send invoice to the customer along with executive summary of what was done and good tidings.
• Schedule meetings and list customer requirements for upcoming work.
• Send customer supporting documentation, such as instructions or screen shots.

I’m sure there’s more, but my point is, all this stuff takes a long time. During this finishing process you’re often wrapping up loose ends that can send you back to square one. When you’re so close to being done, you tend to get obsessive about finishing, which means you’re up late working because you’re almost there.

I can see why businesses fail. I can see how a lot of people aren’t cut out to do this. I have huge motivation for running my own business, I like the lifestyle and in addition to my work related skills I have business and accounting degrees. I just don’t see how people without this would be able to do it.

Last night I was trying to finish up some stuff for a small client so I’d have everything they need done by the end of the month. It was kind of a trial as I upgraded their site to use Slimbox 2 and was running into an issue that was totally messing me up. It turned out to be a directory permissions issue. While I love Safari, it could have been a bit more clear about the fact that it couldn’t read the files in a certain directory. That is, when you say it took “this long” to read a file, I tend to assume that you actually read that file. Never assume.

I was just finishing up and looking forward to some TV when I noticed some links at the bottom of the pages. Oh great, the site had been hacked. By a hacker who had a lot of time on his hands. The hacker had gone into my custom code and found the exact place to include his links. I was amazed. Luckily, he was very clean about it, and since I use Subversion to track all my code, I just deleted all the files in the directory and copied the right ones back, changed the passwords, and did some other stuff.

From the looks of it, I think the user had full access to the account. The passwords were on the weaker side and I left them that way because quite honestly this isn’t a site with that much traffic. There’s no customer data stored on the site or anything like that. I can’t imagine it would have been worth his while to hack it. It’s also a site that’s clearly maintained, so I just don’t see the point. But it took me a while to deal with it. Now the passwords are ridiculously strong.

I really don’t like the web host this customer is using. It’s Lunarpages. They don’t support sftp, or ssh, or any number of other things and they’re all around lame. So we will be moving the site to a new host soon.

I used to be more easy going about this, if customers had a host, I wouldn’t try to get them to change, but now that I have a host that I know is economical, secure, and easy to use, I think I’ll be more likely to suggest the switch. It’s easy enough to cost justify, and will save all of us pain in the future.

The software basically works as advertised, but saving and reading files was extremely slow. If I were working on documents it would be fine, but I can go from the editor to the browser once a second at times when I’m testing out various one or two character changes, and having to wait 5 or 10 seconds for a save just doesn’t work.

The Macfusion part was required to mount sshfs drives. In theory kind of awesome, but it doesn’t automatically mount them, and they tend to disappear if I close my laptop. Not having them there all the time makes some things difficult. First, it always catches you by surprise that they’re not there. That’s annoying. Second, sometimes trying to use things like Subversion tools, like Cornerstone, gets very weird if the directories are disappearing from time to time, not to mention the scans some of these tools do take forever because of the network issues.

So I installed the 64-bit version of mysql on my MacBook, I scoured the web for the various plist files that are required to get mysql to run at startup. I compared the files and determined the correct version of the file for my uses. I created one of soon to be many Wordpress installations. And each of the steps had its classic holdups that I forget about until I have to do it again. How does one change a password in mysql? Oh yeah, Wordpress needs 127.0.01 instead of localhost for the database location.

All of this stuff is in many ways fun for me. But I actually have stuff to do. The new theme for this site is so close to being done, and this is the stuff blocking it. Some days it seems like you never get through the admin stuff to the point where you actually get work done. Right now I need to go to Costco and then go home and give Kody (my dog) some time.

I’m just happy.

Right now when I think about my design business, I just think about how happy I am, and that’s what I want to blog about.

But I have no time. With all the work, it’s hard taking care of my dog, and cleaning the house, and paying bills. It’s really like there’s not enough time in the day. And I always have something I should be doing. And when I get so mentally tired I just want to veg out in front of the TV, that’s when my dog thinks it’s play time, and it so isn’t. So it’s sort of like the cost of living the life I want, is that I actually have to work all the time.

It’s still better.