So, for the past couple weeks I have been baffled - every time I try to update apps on any of my Macs, the update fails and I am presented with a dialog box that says "To update this application, please sign in with the account you used to purchase it".

One big problem - I already was.  I only have one iTunes account.

So.. yesterday, I decided to monitor the console - in doing so, I noticed that each time I tried to update, I saw an error with mds - a spotlight derivative.

Interestingly enough, all of my mac machines use SSDs.  Because they use SSDs, I have made several enhancements to my machine to prevent excess drive writes (to prevent un-necessary wear on the SSD).  One of the common "Enhancements" I make is to completely disable spotlight, and also add my main HDD to the list of locations NOT to index.

So, I wondered if this could be causing the issue.  I re-enabled Spotlight, and removed my drive from the blocked locations.  I waited for a while to allow spotlight to finish indexing (the magnifying glass icon in the upper right corner of the finder will have a "dot" in it while it's indexing".  Once it finished, I reopened the App Store and guess what - everything worked fine.

Apparently, the app update process requires spotlight.  Maybe this is done to "find" apps in the event that the user has moved it from it's original location?  Not sure, but - for now I'll leave it enabled I guess.  

If you're having trouble, too - follow these steps and things should start working again!

As I have mentioned on this blog more times than I care to remember, I'm a bit of a geek.  I love tech, love making tech work well, and love integrating tech into anything where tech can be integrated.  One of the places I have decided to integrate as much tech as possible is in my home.  This is not unique, most homes nowdays are getting exceedingly complex, simply because the range of "cool" devices for the home is growing.  In fact, home networks are sometimes as complex as a small business or small corporate networks.  

Unfortunately for most people, integrating tech into their home means huge expense, because the only choices are to buy (more expensive and generally poor performing) wireless devices, or to retrofit a finished home with wiring to support the necessary infrastructure.  Retrofit usually means tearing apart walls, rebuilding walls, and trying to snake cables through existing walls.

Knowing the pain that this causes, when I was building my house 8 years ago, I wanted to run tons of wire to support anything that I could dream up.   Technology 8 years ago wasn't anywhere near where it is today - but I knew it would get there, and I knew awesome hardware would only come down in price.

For starters, I wanted multiple three way jacks in every room of the house - each containing two pieces of CAT-5e (For phone and gigabit ethernet, or dual gigabit ethernet) and a piece of quad-shield RG6 (for cable TV).  I also wanted to run speaker wire in the living room for surround sound, and speaker wire into all of the bedrooms and the ceilings of the bathrooms.  Additionally, I wanted to install my own alarm system - I didn't want the cookie cutter piece of crap my homebuilder offered - I wanted an alarm with the features I wanted, the sensors I wanted, and wanted it all installed the way I wanted it installed and where I wanted it installed.  Finally, I wanted to run some power wire and RG-6 to several points on the outside of the house so that I could easily install a surveillance system.  At the time, that seemed nutty - but today they are so reasonably priced, I'm glad I ran the wire long ago.

Keep in mind, I decided to build this house when I was 26 years old.  I knew that I wouldn't be able to afford everything right away - but, wire is relatively cheap.  Wiring a newbuilt home is especially affordable when you can run it yourself before the drywall is installed and pay your friends to help with a couple of cases of bud light =).

So... I bought almost two miles of wire.  More quad shield RG-6, CAT-5e, Speaker Wire, Power Wire, and other miscellaneous wire than you could possibly imagine.  Enough wire that it took me two trips in my 1993 Eagle Talon hatchback (with the seats DOWN, mind you) to get it out to my house.  Now, if you saw my house - you'd wonder where in the hell all this wire was going to go.  I live in a modestly sized home (1700-ish square feet) on a slab.  It took an entire weekend - but I ran nearly all of that wire - even to places I didn't know if I would ever need it.

Flash forward 8 years to today.  Nearly every wire has been properly terminated and is active and available for use.  I use business class networking gear and firewall and have a 50 megabit internet connection.  My surveillance system is active and can be monitored even when away from home.  The alarm is exactly the way I wanted it, my home entertainment center is modest but all of the wires are hidden, and all of the rooms upstairs have volume controls and in-wall or in-ceiling speakers.

So - it's done?  No way.  "Done" is not in my DNA.  I continually upgrade and replace hardware, and sell my old goods on eBay to keep the tech fresh in my house.  As my network has grown and gotten faster, it's reach has gotten further (external devices remote from my home), and it has gotten more complex - I decided it was time to start monitoring it.

This is especially more important to me now that some internet service providers are starting to monitor their users and apply caps.  My ISP is not one of those, but it really has myself asking "how much bandwidth do I use?".  Most of my services in my house (netflix, xbox live, vonage, etc) all consume bandwidth just to operate - and to me, these are very much all "black box devices" and I have no idea what they are using.  So I have decided to start a series of articles describing the answers to this very question.  So to start off, I wanted to describe my home network and how I'll be monitoring it with an awesome piece of software provided to me from Paessler called PRTG Network Monitor.

So - below you will find a diagram of the majority of the devices in my home - not everything is on this particular diagram, but the most important bits are:

Crazy eh?  Yeah - I didn't realize how much crap I had until I set out on this trek to start monitoring everything.

So, from the outside world, my home is connected to the internet via a 50 megabit cable connection through a Motorola DOCSIS 3 cable modem.  This connection offers a pretty stable 50 megabits downstream and 5 megabits upstream - more than enough to supply my media devices with the media they need, allow me to VPN into my network to use my resources or monitor surveillance from remote if needed, and provide some extra speed so that surfing the web doesn't slow to a crawl just because I'm watching netflix.

The motorola cable modem meets my home by way of a Cisco ASA 5505 firewall appliance.   From here, access is split through the house via two Gigabit Cisco SRW2016 business class switches - one in the computer room, and another downstairs.

All of the desktop and laptop computers in my house are really focused on performance - they all have SSDs for their boot drives, and on laptops - this is the only drive.  They have a minimum of 8GB of RAM, and powerful processors.  Since space comes at a premium on SSDs - none of my laptops and desktops contain anything more than temporary data.

So where is all of the data?  It's on the server.  The main machine that is the centerpiece of the home is a dual quad core Nehalem Xeon server with 4TB of RAID5 disk space, 24GB of RAM, and dual gigabit ethernet adapters.  This contains a basic O/S install that houses a few fileshares and a copy of VMWare server.  VMWare runs five seperate Virtual machines - a Domain Controller, a Subversion Server, a Web/Email Server (internal only - used for development testing), a generic Windows XP Snapshot VM that I use whenever I want to "test" a piece of software and then revert to a clean image, and a newly added PRTG Network monitor machine.

The rest of the devices in the home are either wired or wireless, but are mostly either network appliances or network connected media devices, printers, or other simple systems.

So - that is a quick introduction to what is going on in my world.  This network started with a single domain controller and two laptops and over the years has evolved into this behemoth.  This network not only keeps me entertained at home, it also supports my livelihood.  Being a professional developer by trade, this network often serves as an important test bed for products or technologies that I am working on.

As you can see, without a proper monitoring solution - outages or breaks in my network can be as hard to find in my home as they would be in a small corporate network.  Keep in mind that networks like mine are becoming more and more commonplace in homes as even the most mundane devices are given wireless network access.

Over the next several months, I am going to be posting several articles ranging from the installation and configuration of PRTG Network Monitor (in my experience, the best network monitoring product you can find, bar none), to real world findings as I continually monitor the network I just described.  Specifically, I am interested to see exactly how much data I use over a month, a quarter, and a year with devices like AppleTV, XBox, Vonage, etc.  It is by monitoring my usage that I hope to put some sense behind the bandwidth caps that some ISPs are enforcing nowdays.

Now - keep in mind, I don't torrent, I don't host a website or e-mail server in my home, etc.  Regardless of how crazy my network configuration seems - my usage model is pretty standard.  I'm hoping that my real world results will equate similarly with that of many of my readers, and I hope you will find it interesting.

Next up - I will be discussing installation and configuration of PRTG Network monitor.  Stay Tuned!

Just when I thought that my debacle with the iPad 2 order process couldn't get any worse - the early opening, the 3-5 day timeframe from the get go, the stupid lack of a real preorder....

At the time of my last post, I had ordered my new iPad - officially placed about 15 minutes prior to 4:00AM EST.  From staying up so late I had gotten my second wind, so despite laying down to sleep - I couldn't.  I tossed and turned for a little bit, and then I said heck with it, I'd check to see if the order status had magically changed around 5:30AM.

Now, when I ordered - I decided to use a gift card.  Apple's website has a great feature that I wish more sites had that allows you to split your payment across multiple credit cards.  Since most "real" gift cards nowdays are just credit cards - this gives you a chance to use a gift card to pay for part of your order.   I had a $200 AmEx gift card (courtesy of American Express' Rewards program) - so I was going to split $200 of my order onto the gift card and the remainder of the order would go on my standard AmEx green card.

Ordering was uneventful.  I told the order process to use two cards, I entered my Gift card number on the first card and entered $200 as the amount to put on this card.  When you enter a fixed amount on the first card, Apple's site automatically calculates the amount to go on the second card.  Perfect - all was well - or so I thought.

When I logged back into Apple's site at 5:30AM, I noticed that my order was flagged in yellow and said that it required attention.  Clicking the order, I waited for Apple's overloaded system to churn and churn and show my order detail - only to see it read "We are unable to process your credit card".

Now, for those of you familiar with AmEx Green cards - they have no limit - so I instantly knew the problem was the gift card.   I logged into AmEx's gift card website to check my balance and look at the activity.  I had already done this in the morning and KNEW that the card was never used and had $200 available - so what's the problem??

My order contained an iPad, a case, and the HDMI adapter.  When I looked at the gift card site, I noticed two charges for $41 and some change (which is the partial order cost of the case and the HDMI adapter.  Whats this, though - I see a third charge for $1?  WTF?  Are you kidding me - despite giving a hard $200 limit on the gift card - it appears that Apple had performed a pre-auth for $1 (most likely to validate that the card number is good).  On a normal credit card, this wouldn't be a problem because most credit card companies will allow you to over-auth a card (although with the new credit card regulations, this is changing).  Now - when they were trying to capture the remaining balance of the $200 - they would be authorizing a total of $201 on my gift card, which, of course, would cause it to decline.

I was more than pissed.  I picked up the phone to call Apple - guess what, the ordering started at 4AM (1AM PST), but there is no PHONE SUPPORT until 8AM (5AM PST).   Not only did I wait up all night to get a nice early order in - I was assured that this would completely hose my order and cause it to miss the first round of shipments.

8AM comes - I call Apple.  The gentleman I spoke to was nice, but he was asking me if I could "just add some extra funds to the card to make it go through".  I was like "Um, no.  This isn't a gas station, sir - I gave you a prescribed amount to put on the card - how is it my issue if your system wants to authorize $201 on a $200 hard limit?".  

So then he was like, "Well - you could always cancel and reorder".  Of course, working in eCommerce in the past, I knew this meant that they would simply cancel the order and allow the authorizations on my credit card to expire on their own.  This means that the authorizations Apple had placed on my gift card would remain for up to 7 days - clearly not a solution, either, especially since the lead time on new orders was now showing 2-3 weeks.

Long story short - by around 10:00 AM the order was in process.  I spent over an hour on the phone, and the gentleman had to call a manager at Apple.  I assume Apple uses an off-site call-center that really doesn't have the ability to change anything other than small order details, so he had to track down someone who could actually *really* fix this on Apple's campus.

This sucks.

First lesson learned - If you need to use a gift card on Apple's split-tender system, make sure you shave off a few bucks to ensure the frickin charge goes through when they overauth your card.

Second lesson learned - When you call Apple's Order Help number and the stupid ass computer answers the phone and says "Oh hai, I can understand full sentences, how can I help you?" there's an easy way to get to a representative - just say "Go F*ck Yourself" - it worked for me twice. 

Now to end the story - I wish I could say my iPad was now in transit to me.  It still shows 3-5 days until shipment with an estimated delivery day of 3/18-3/25.  Here's the shitter, though - one of my coworkers, who ordered his 1/2 hour after I did already shows "Prepared for Shipment".  Basically, despite staying up all night, despite getting my order in early - Apple's half-wit credit card handling process has now screwed the order priority I sought to attain.

Bah!