Month: February 2018

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Adding a 2.5″ drive to a Mac Pro 2008

I have a couple of spare 500GB 2.5″ drives that were going to go into my HP DL380 rack server, but for the reasons described here, I ended up replacing with some WD drives instead. So I wanted to install these in my Mac Pro instead to at least get some use from them.

The pre ‘trash can’ Mac Pro towers have 4 slide out drive trays (see here across the center of the case) that allow you to easily install or remove 3.5″ drives without messing with any cables. Attach a drive into a drive sled, screw in the 4 screws on the sled and then push it in.

For 2.5″ drives however, they obviously won’t fit into the drive sled. There’s a number of adapter options if you just Google for “mac pro 2.5 drive adapter” or similar, and the prices are all over from $5 to $30 or more.

I went for a cheaper $5 option on Amazon. When the adapter arrived, what’s interesting is it looks like the adapter was 3D printed:

The kit came with easy to follow instructions and needed screws.

 

 

Following the instructions and attaching the drive, here’s what it looks like with the adapter fitted into one of the drive sleds:

 

 

 

On booting up, the top drive is the original disk that came in this used Mac Pro, it has an HFS+ partition installed with El Cap, and a partition installed with  Windows 10. The 2nd is the newly added 2.5″ 500GB disk. Great!

 

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AWS Lambda cost calculator webapp

AWS Lambda usage costs are a little tricky to understand, because the usage cost is per GB seconds of usage. This is calculated from the execution time of your Lambda by the GB of memory it is configured to use. For example, a single request to a Lambda configured to use 1GB that executes for 1 sec is 1 GB-sec.

AWS offers a free tier that includes the first 400,000 GB-s for free, and the first 1,000,000 requests a month for free. Above those you’re charged $0.00001667 for each GB-s and $0.20 for every 1M additions requests. Check the details here.

I put together a simple webapp that allows you to play with the numbers and see what your costs are going to look like. You can check it out (served from AWS S3) here:

 

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/awslambdacostcalc/index.html

If you’re interested in taking a look at the source for the React app, it’s here on Github. Create me a ticket if you find any issues.

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Setting up a local production Jira installation with MySQL

Download the Jira server install from here.

Follow the steps here to download and add the JDBC driver to your Jira server. Download and copy the mysql connector jar to

/opt/atlassian/jira/lib/

Chose the ‘set up myself’ option, and complete the form to point to your already installed MySQL db instance:

Configure your install properties:

On the next screen you’ll be prompted for your license key, or head over to the Atlassian site to purchase or create a trial key. When you enter your organization name (above) on the license site it will pick up your site id.

Create an admin user, continue and now you’re up and running!

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Fixing npm global install permissions on MacOS

By default npm on MacOS tries to install global modules (npm install -g somemodule) to /usr/local/lib/node_modules and you get this error:

Error: EACCES: permission denied, access \'/usr/local/lib/node_modules\'

The npm docs here have a couple of steps to avoid this by telling npm to install to a location where you have have access to:

mkdir ~/.npm-global
npm config set prefix '~/.npm-global'

Edit your .profile or .bash_profile to add the new location to your PATH:

export PATH=~/.npm-global/bin:$PATH

Now you should be all set!

 

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