a view through my own eyes

So this week at work has been booked in for the last month or so as time to migrate the OS X Open Directory from the Tiger Xserves onto the Leopard Xserves and a whole load of other work in the grand scheme of having a unified OS X desktop service comparable to the Windows service.

After Plan A for the migration went to pieces, we dropped back to Plan B (the Apple recommended way) and had to live with resetting user passwords back to defaults, which was easily scripted (dscl for the command line junkies) but we wanted to leave the passwords as is as it it the nice thing to do. Incidentally Plan A involved taking a manual LDAP dump, a password dba dump, munging the encryption keys and then doing a fiddle to get the passwords imported and Kerberised – so naturally it didn’t work. Anyway Plan B was successful so all is good in the world.

Then the RAID battery died and things got interesting, so I phone AppleCare – yes no problem we can send out a new battery for a d-i-y job but we want a credit card details in case you don’t return the faulty parts.

Errrr no

Alternative is to send an engineer who will do the work and take the knackered bit back.

Yup, that will do.

An hour later I get an email from Apple: sorry but we can’t send an engineer as you are more than 40 miles from London, but we will send the parts for free.

Sigh.

But it turns out that the local Apple Service site will send an engineer out under AppleCare for Xserves.

Result.

So why on earth did Apple themselves not tell me that when I phoned?

PS: Snow Leopard is really rather shiny.