file copy

Getting a file from a Samba server in an Ansible playbook

For a project I'm working on, I needed to make one of my Ansible playbooks grab an archived file off a Windows share using smbclient.

There are a few concerns when doing something like this:

  1. There are a few required dependencies that need to be installed and configured.
  2. Unless you have a really insecure windows share, you need a username and password to access the share—and you should never put credentials into any kind of plaintext file!
  3. Many Windows-based environments also need the appropriate workgroup set in Samba's configuration file.

I'll dive right in and show you how to set up samba and grab a file from a share in an Ansible playbook:

Problems copying a huge Aperture library from one drive to another

I've often had trouble copying files with Mac OS X's Finder. From back in the Mac OS X Beta days (when it was based on NeXT's UI), hard drive to hard drive copies, network copies, and backups have often had strange quirks, and one of the strangest I've yet found happened yesterday when I tried copying a ~170GB Aperture library from one external USB drive to another.

I tried copying the library three times, and each time the copy would get to about 24GB, the hard drive (from which the library was being copied) would make a loud CLICK, and then it would unmount and remount, stopping the library file copy. This particular drive has never had troubles in the past, and the fact that it kept doing the CLICK-die thing at 24GB meant that there may have been a file problem or a Finder bug causing the problem.

I verified the drive using Disk Utility (could've gone deeper and used other utilities too), but only found one or two small errors (a file count one file off, or a few improper permissions). After repairing the disk, the drive still clicked off at 24GB.

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