Mac OS X Apple Airpods + Logitech MX Keyboard / Mouse Bluetooth conflicts

I recently encountered what appears to be a common issue with Apple bluetooth and Logitech MX products.

Hardware & Software

• OS X 13.4.1
• Apple 14″ Macbook Pro M1
• Apple Air Pod Pro v2
• Logitech Options+ v1.5
• Logitech MX Keys Mini
• Logitech MX Master 3 (mouse) for Mac

Symptom

The Logitech MX keyboard and mouse work just fine when they are the only devices connected over Bluetooth to my Mac Laptop. As soon as I connect my Apple AirPod Pro headphones to the computer my keyboard and mouse are intermittently disconnected.

Keyboard Specific Symptoms

• The keyboard will disconnect from the laptop
• Keystrokes must be pressed multiple times before the keyboard will re-attach to the laptop

Fix

There appears to be no simple fix since when apple products connect to an apple laptop they in most cases take conflicting bluetooth channels which are already in use. This creates a scenario where the AirPod pro headphones work, but the other bluetooth connected peripherals do not.

I solved this issue by purchasing not one but two Logitech usb receivers.

• Logitech Bolt Receiver
• Logitech Unifying Receiver

This is a bit of a sledgehammer solution and completely removes both Logitech MX mouse and keyboard connectivity from the Bluetooth OS X stack. Since I work from home and use these products every day it was worth the roughly $30 to permanently resolve this issue.

Note: If Logitech updates their Bolt software to include OS X 13.4 support only one receiver is required.

Apple OS X – Force Persistent AirDrop Enable / Disable

Error: Airdrop the operation can’t be completed because the item can’t be found.

Symptoms:
– From finder airdrop doesn’t show up
– AirDrop listed in spotlight search but won’t launch
– AirDrop support not listed under eN0 network interface
– AirDrop listed under system applications list but won’t launch
– Airdrop doesn’t show up for launch even after rebooting, logout login etc.

From Terminal on OS X

DISABLE AirDrop
> defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser DisableAirDrop -bool YES

FIX / ENABLE Airdrop
> defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser DisableAirDrop -bool NO

Fix Source: Illinois University How to Disable Airdrop on OS X Computers

Pioneer – Apple Car Play USB Issues

Roughly a year and a half ago I successfully upgraded one of our cars stereos with a new Pioneer AVH-4200NEX head unit.  The install was simple and the result was updating what was a mid 2000 era head unit with one which supported Bluetooth, Apple CarPlay, and hands free calling.  All was well until this past week when Apple CarPlay quit working.

Symptoms

• USB Connection no longer charges devices
• Error displayed indicating USB connection is not supported and that the device will be disabled for protection purposes
• Error displayed “no response” when connecting the phone

My first step in troubleshooting this issue was to upgrade both the Pioneer head unit and iPhones to the latest firmware version.

Pioneer Head Unit: AVH-4200 NEX with firmware version 0.6

iPhone X with iOS Version: 11.4.1

The Fix

Upgrading the firmware versions did not resolve the issue but changed the error from “USB is not supported…” to “no response”.  Further investigation led to review of the discovered Apple CarPlay devices on each phone.  Since we’ve both been traveling there were a number of rental cars which had registered with our phones.  Clearing all of the registered devices including our head unit resolved the issue.

iPhone Steps (version 11.4.1):

Note: Disconnect your phone from your head unit before performing these steps.

1. Open Settings -> General -> CarPlay
2. Under MY CAR select each discovered CarPlay system and select “Forget This Car”. The Pioneer unit will show up as “AV Receiver”
3. Repeat removal for all entries which are listed
4. Reconnect phone to head unit and accept prompts allowing the receiver to access your phone.

 

The Future of NetApp

NetApp like it or not is in trouble.  Several sites have documented the recent decline and have shown the potential problems plaguing the company.  I think it’s time to move past the problems facing NetApp and offer up a number of potential solutions which would ensure NetApp has a bright future.  Since this is something that has been lacking in posts on other sites I thought I’d share how I think NetApp should change their business to adapt to the new storage marketplace.

New Hardware (controllers & shelves)

Somewhere within NetApp some engineer has realized that their hardware is outdated and in need of a serious refresh.  Specifically I’d like to see NetApp come out with much denser shelves which use 2.5″ drives.  Their target needs to be at least 50+ disks per 4U with either a PCIe or IB interconnect. The cheapest option will be IB, but to be truly innovative they should be looking at using the next high speed interconnect.  That would be PCIe.

Next let’s address the elephant in the room… their storage controllers.  It’s time for internal drives.  Why they didn’t do this years ago is beyond me.  How awesome would it be to have a root aggregate stored on mirrored SSD drives which are PCIe attached on each controller? Their short term solution is root-data partitioning which takes slices out of a select number of drives to host the root aggregate.  The catch is it’s only supported on all flash FAS and smaller arrays which I’m guessing don’t make sense to have isolated root aggrs due to the disk overhead.  The real reason for making the root aggregate separate and internal is to simplify architecting clean aggregate layouts on NetApp arrays.  Right now the math when buying shelves works out just like buying hot dogs and buns.

WAFL

WAFL file system is showing its age which means it’s time for NetApp to build the next generation of WAFL.  They can take a couple queues from their growing number of competitors.  First up is making it a fully implemented log structured file system.  This means in-line data defragmentation with no performance overhead.  With flash plentiful and cheap, this should no longer be an issue.  If Nimble Storage can do it, why can’t NetApp? NetApp should be innovating in this space and making it easier for its sales force and engineers to tell their customers how they are adapting their existing efficiencies to the new storage market.

Flash

The future of storage is flash based.  Anyone who disputes this is either focused on a niche workload or can’t see the tsunami of cheap high density flash that’s about to hit the market in the next year. Case in point Samsung just announced a 15TB flash drive. Granted it’s not the fastest thing on the planet, but it does signal that density will not be an issue for all flash arrays in the near future.  NetApp needs a play here and fast.  This either means that Flash Ray needs to get it’s act together, or all Flash FAS needs to do more than be a special version of Data ONTAP.

Either way here’s a list of must haves for the future all flash version of whatever NetApp comes out with.

1. Active-Active Scale Up & Scale Out Array
2. In-Line Dedupe & Compression
3. Fully implemented log structured file system (defrag on ingest)
4. Simple RAID Group Layouts (I don’t want to pick a RAID group size ever again)
5. All Flash Tiering (super fast to not as fast)
6. Cloud Tiering (Amazon S3, Swift, Azure etc.)

Saying that your existing Data ONTAP platforms support some of these features is not acceptable to existing and potential customers.  This is what the market is dictating.

NetApp… don’t let your competitors both new and existing eat your lunch.

NetApp Cluster-Mode Active Directory Authentictation Syntax

NetApp cluster-mode filers support active directory domain authentication.

1. License CIFS
2. Build CIFS vserver
3. Create domain-tunnel (allows authentication against vserver which is domain attached)
4. Create domain user on filer and assign it to either the cluster vserver or the cifs vserver.

When attempting to login you may run into the following error.

Error: Account not configured to connect in this manner.

This error indicates that you are using the wrong syntax for logging into the filer.  In all cases the domain must be UPPERCASE.

Bad: domain\username
Good: DOMAIN\username

NetApp – Kill CIFS Sessions Per Volume

During volume migrations it’s handy to be able to terminate CIFS sessions on a per volume basis.  Here’s how to clear cifs sessions on a per volume basis.

filer>cifs terminate -t <time in seconds> -v <volume name>

Powershell – Update NTFS Audit Levels

Here are the required steps for updating audit rules on Windows NTFS shares with PowerShell.

 # PowerShell Script used for updating and removing NTFS Audit Rules
 # The $path variable represents the UNC path to the share that the script is being executed against.
 #
 # Comment or Un-Comment the Remove or Set rules to update a shares permissions.

get-date
 $path \\\

# Get the current ACL details
 $CurrentACL = get-acl $path

if (!($CurrentACL -eq $null)) {

# Success & Failure
 $AccessRule = new-object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAuditRule("Everyone","ChangePermissions,DeleteSubdirectoriesAndFiles,Delete,TakeOwnership","ContainerInherit","None","Success,Failure")

# Remove Audit Rule
 #$CurrentACL.RemoveAuditRule($AccessRule)

# Set New Audit Rule
 #$CurrentACL.AddAuditRule($AccessRule)

# Apply New Permissions
 set-acl $path -AclObject $CurrentACL
 } else {
 Write-Host "ACL's unsuccessfully pulled from path $path"
 }

get-date

NetApp SnapMirror 7-Mode to Cluster-Mode

Here are the steps required to manually initiate a snapmirror relationship between a NetApp 7-Mode and a Cluster-Mode

7-Mode to Cluster Mode Version Requirements
Source Filer: 8.x 7-Mode and Higher
Dest. Filer: 8.2.x and Higher

7-Mode Source Filer Steps
– Allow destination filer either within snapmirror.allow file or within options snapmirror.access host =

Cluster-Mode Destination Filer Steps
– Create a new transition Lif assigned to a Node which is set to intercluster for both the Role and the Firewall Policy.
– Create a vserver peer transition relationship between the source and destination filer and associate it to the transition lif
– Create a new destination volume that is the same size or bigger than the source volume. Make sure to specify the type of the volume as DP (data protection)
– Create the new snapmirror relationship with type set to TDP
– Initialize the mirror using snapmirror initialize followed by the destination path

Optionally you can create a snapmirror policy that is applied to any new transition snapmirror relationships to ensure consistency when cutting over volumes in bulk.

OS X 10.9 Epson Printer – Enable Duplex Printing

Epson recently released a driver update for OS X 10.9 Mavericks which automatically shows up within the Apps/Software update menu. Like most users my wife dutifully added the update which then removed her duplex printing settings.  
Notice the “Two-Sided” printing option is off and grayed out.
While I’m sure this was unintended it did pose a real problem. After reinstalling drivers and the printer itself several times I found the following fix.

1. Select “Printer Features” from the pull down menu (Hint: Click Layout)
2. From the “Feature Set” pull down menu select “General 6”

You’ll notice that buried within this sub menu is the option we’re looking for.

3. Select 2-Sided Printing ON
4. In order to ensure you never have to set this option again save your new settings.

You can see in this screen capture I’ve already saved mine as “Duplex!”

Fix OS X Mavericks Continuously Prompting for KeyChain Password

Symptom: Upon login OS X Mavericks continuously prompts you for a Key chain password which does not match either your iCloud/iTunes credentials or your local login credentials.

Fix:

* Go to Finder.
* On the Finder menu, click on “Go”, then on “Go to Folder”. A box should come up.
* On the box, type in “~/Library/Keychains/” and click on “Go”. It should lead you to the Keychains folder where you will find three items: (1) a folder with a name mixed with letters and numbers, (2) login.keychain, and (3) metadata.keychain.

* Delete the folder with a name mixed with letters and numbers.
* Restart your computer. Check to see if the problem has been solved.

Solution Source: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1652089