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Mac users are more picky about how the UI looks and behaves. But it's not just the details which don't work, it's basic things which we all, even those working with Windows and Linux, take for granted and rely on in our everyday interaction with the computer. Things like copy and paste, or the fact that the UI respects the keyboard layout. And then, of course, there is the issue with games not launching or crashing. But such problems are to be expected from an early beta, right?

It's obvious that the Mac client was rushed. The official beta period was way too short to work out all the bugs. Working with Mac users may not be easy, especially for companies which so far have only developed for the Windows platform. But it's not impossible, Blizzard games work very well on Mac (they do require a case-insensitive filesystem, but at least they are self-contained and can be installed completely inside a disk image).

A few months ago I was talking to one of my profs and we spoke briefly about terminal applications for Mac OS X. At that time I was using iTerm and I justified my choice by iTerm's ability to display 256 colors instead of just 16 in Terminal. But that was only part of the reason. A much bigger issue with Terminal is the inability to set word boundary characters (apparently they are hardcoded inside Cocoa). And because spend a considerable time in the terminal, not being able to double-click paths and URLs to select them is a real turnoff.

The official MacFUSE release doesn't work under 64bit kernels and the original maintainer hasn't touched the code in a while. Fortunately, the source code needed only two minor changes and then I was able to compile it under Snow Leopard. You can get the source from my github repository. For your convenience I've also built a package, you can get it here. DISCLAIMER: Use at your own risk, I'm not a Mac developer, I know nothing about the Darwin kernel. If it makes your computer explode, don't hold me responsible!

I would much rather use ZFS than Time Machine, but Apple seems to have decided to remove ZFS from their next Mac OSX release. Though one feature in Time Machine is particularly intriguing: backup over wireless network. Apple Time Capsule is a wireless access point with a builtin harddrive. Whenever your Mac sees the Time Capsule, it will send the backup there. But there is another way to back up Time Machine wirelessly: iSCSI.

There are quite a few blog posts and discussions about how to set up Time Machine to back up to ZFS/iSCSI. Setting up iSCSI on OpenSolaris was surprisingly easy. I only had to install one package (SUNWiscsitgt) and then set shareiscsi=on on the ZFS volume. And voila, I was able to mount the disk from my MacBook using the globalSAN iSCSI Initiator. However I was really disappointed by the performance. After starting the initial Time Machine backup the throughput was less than 1 MByte/s, but iSCSI should be much faster! It turns out that iSCSI issues many small sync writes and it makes ZFS very slow on conventional hard drives. Some folks in #opensolaris on irc.freenode.net suggested that I should put the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) on a faster disk such as a SSD or a RAM disk. I know enterprise grade storage systems do this because of performance reasons, but I don't really have space in the server to put another disk in (it's a small Shuttle barebone). My solution was to temporarily disable the ZIL. With ZIL disabled I was getting 8-10 MBit/s which is the limit of my 100 Mbit/s network. It's unfortunate that OpenSolaris needs such workaround, I was hoping for ZFS/iSCSI to be usable without enterprise-grade hardware setups.