Diary of a Bad Golfer

Having a lot of space on my home file server and using XBMC, I prefer to keep all my DVD’s as ISO’s on my network so I can stream them.  Most of the time after I rip them I’m left with the VIDEO_TS directory, on Windows I would use something like DVD Shrink to make them into an ISO so I was looking for something similar on my Mac.  After looking around I found I didn’t need any software, I can do it natively.  Open up a terminal and navigate to the folder level just below the VIDEO_TS folder.

hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name <Movie Name> -o <Movie Name>.iso <folder name>

I guess this is a little old but I had been using Jungle Disk as a front end for Amazon S3 but didn’t want to fork out the cash after the trial period for a Mac and Windows version.  I already use Transmit daily for FTP/SFTP (I personally prefer Transmit over Cyber Duck).  In the latest version they have added support for connecting to S3, works perfect for me as I wasn’t looking for any type of automated backup to S3.  I only use S3 to upload some documents to occasionally that I want off site.  I did like that Jungle Disk could mount my S3 bucket as a drive, I’ve also noticed that Jungle Disk seemed to handle the files I uploaded in a unique way, there seems to be 2 copies of every file I uploaded with a .dir and a .attr extension to them.

Recently I have setup a NLB IIS site with 2 VM’s in a DRS/HA cluster.  Because of this using unicast mode was not an option (we need to be able to vMotion the virtual machines).  Multicast is also the way VMware recommends setting it up.  From VMware’s site:

Note: VMware recommends configuring the cluster to use NLB multicast mode even though NLB unicast mode should function correctly if you complete these steps. This recommendation is based on the possibility that the settings described in these steps might affect VMotion operations on virtual machines. Also, unicast mode forces the physical switches on the LAN to broadcast all NLB cluster traffic to every machine on the LAN. If you plan to use NLB unicast mode, you must run all members of the NLB cluster on the same virtual switch.

The other problem with unicast mode is you have to disable RARP for either the virtual switch or the port group:

The other thing you need to do if using multicast mode, is add a static ARP entry in your switch for the MAC address of the NLB cluster, which is found under the cluster properties in NLB manager.  For a Cisco switch, from config mode:

arp <ip of nlb cluster> <mac of nlb cluster> arpa