Odds and Ends: "hot-swapping" SCSI drives; Case-sensitive backups; Knowledge Base Updates

"Hot-swapping" SCSI drives in OS X? Reader Denis Heraud reports an issue that is preventing his company from moving to OS X:

"We use G4's along with ATTO ExpressPCI SCSI cards. With these cards we use some of Glyph's dual-bay SCSI chassis to hot-swap removable SCSI carriers...using ATTO's ExpressPro Tools [under OS 9] to mount drives whenever we inserted them (after the computer had booted).

"Now we are migrating to Mac OS X and we have hit a showstopper that might not let us upgrade until a solution is found. There is no longer a way to mount the drives dynamically after the computer is booted, this is quite a problem since we can't possibly reboot the computer in the middle of recording sessions to simply mount a hard drive.

"I have posted this problem on the Apple discussion boards without any answer from an Apple rep. or from users. ATTO let me know that this is a kernel limitation and that until that is fixed at the OS level, no software would mount SCSI drives without first rebooting."

Backing up Case-sensitive drives Yesterday we reported on the risks of using the new Case-sensitive HFS file system in OS X, citing one reason as the inability of most current backup and disk utility software to work with case-sensitive data. In response, we received an email referencing a recent press release from TOLIS Group, whose BRU backup software is Unix-based and thus compatible with case-sensitive file systems. Archives are also cross-platform compatible. We've never used this product ourselves, so if you have any experience with it, drop us a note.

New/Updated Knowledge Base Articles

• 120269: Security Update 2003-11-04 provides information about, and a download link for, the OS X 10.3 Panther Security Update 2003-11-04.
• 93260: Final Cut Pro 4: Out of Memory Alert With Digidesign Audio Cards discuses an out of memory alert if Final Cut Pro is launched wiht a Digidesign audio card installed.
• 32418: Power Mac G5: About Audio Playthru points out that in order to obtain "audio playthru" capability, you need to use third-party software.
• 25622: Mac OS X 10.3: Cannot Deselect Kotoeri Input in International Preferences notes that if you have third-party input plug-ins installed, Kotoeri-related items may still appear in the input menu even if you deselect them.

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