Andrew Berry Development - OS X

Using a Novatel U760 on Snow Lepoard (with automatic ejecting)

andrew — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:53:30 +0000

One of the most useful new features in Snow Leopard is built-in support for many common WWAN USB devices used to connect to the internet over a 3G connection. This means that instead of having to use a special application (such as "Mobile Connect" when connecting with Bell), you can just use the new menu applet instead. I'm using a Novatel U760 adapter, and here are the steps I used to make its use seamless under 10.6.

Tip: Use NFS instead of Samba for Time Machine Backups

andrew — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:58:36 +0000

I recently converted my Time Machine backup to use NFS instead of Samba. All in all, it was a pretty simple procedure. By using NFS, I dropped userspace CPU usage from a maximum of 40% with Samba to no more than 7-8% with NFS. This is on an AMD 4800+ X2, so the performance gains will be even bigger on slower machines. This means that my media server can now play HDTV h264 files without lagging during backups - a huge win for the elusive "WAF"!