From kc at omnigroup.com Tue Jan 25 15:30:17 2000 From: kc at omnigroup.com (Ken Case) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:57 2005 Subject: OmniGroup Backup 1.1 release candidate 1 is now available Message-ID: <200001252330.PAA16189@scyther.omnigroup.com> OmniGroup Backup 1.1 release candidate 1 is now available from our web site at http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigroupbackup/download/. Ken Release notes for 1.1 release candidate 1 (also available at http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigroupbackup/releasenotes/): The following features are new: * (This isn't really a feature, but we've renamed "Recover" to "Recatalog," since we discovered that that's what most other backup programs call that sort of operation, and since "Recover" was more easily confused with "Restore." Thought I'd mention this first since other entries refer to recatalog operations.) * New Log panel (select "Show Log" under the "Tools" menu, or Command-Shift-L). We've consolidated the logs for all operations (backups, restores, and recatalogs) in one place, and we include much more detail in each log. We also keep log entries up-to-date on the disk, so you can see the log of an operation which is in progress (and will also be able to examine the log later if the system crashes). * It is now possible to backup using a Tecmar Travan tape drive, though we haven't tested this extensively yet and there may be some limitations. (The Travan drive seems to be unable to rewrite starting from the middle of a tape, the entire tape must be rewritten from the beginning.) * Backup automatically ejects the tape in the drive when it needs a different tape. (Some tape auto-changers can be programmed to automatically provide the next tape when this happens.) * Archives no longer automatically try to find space for new backups on old tapes unless you configure them to do so. (You can still set the current tape to an older tape by hand under the archive's "Tapes" tab, or turn on the "Find space for new backups on old tapes" setting under the "Configure" tab.) The ability to find space on old tapes wasn't really intended to be used until we implemented automatic tape reuse policy (overwriting expired backups), which we haven't done yet. * Archives can be configured to require an empty tape for each new backup. (This is for those who wish to change tapes every night without having to run the software and switch to the next tape by hand.) * The FileSets table now displays the date of the last successful backup for each file set. * If Backup mails a message asking for a tape, it will now mail another message when it gets that tape. (This makes it easier to coordinate tape changes when you have more than one person monitoring the contact address. Of course, the automatic eject when another tape is wanted makes that easier, too.) * Logs of unattended backups (successful or not) are now mailed to the archive's contact address. * If a backup to an archive is unable to proceed because another backup to that archive is currently in progress, it will wait for up to 24 hours for the first backup to finish. If the first backup still hasn't finished after 24 hours, it will give up (logging a failure). * We now allow the backup application to be owned by non-root users, though we still warn root that the application they're running is owned by someone else (we say who) and that this could potentially compromise the system if that user isn't trusted. (But if that owner of the application isn't trusted, I guess they could always install their own "Backup" app which didn't provide that warning at all, now couldn't they.) The following bugs are fixed in this release: * If Backup encounters an exception during a recatalog operation, it now saves the final state of the recatalog correctly. * When Backup is unable to communicate with the tape drive to get the drive status, it now retries every fifteen seconds, making it more robust in the face of transient I/O exceptions. * We discovered that tape drives will sometimes refuse to return the current SCSI status when attempting to write past the end of a tape (rather than returning an "end of tape" status), so Backup now prompts for a new tape when this happens, rather than aborting the backup. * Backup now authenticates as "root" rather than as "Administrator": "root" is guaranteed to exist while "Administrator" (root's friendlier alias) is not. * Disallow backups of files from /private/Network/Servers/, explaining that Backup doesn't support backups of automounted files. (That way users don't think they're successfully backing up a folder when in reality it was unmounted out from underneath them half-way through a backup.) * In the non-Pro version, allow the user to exclude network mount points. (They wouldn't have been backed up anyway until the user entered a Pro license, but this way users can plan ahead.) * Increased the size of the preferred tape drive alert field so that it's large enough to display the message "Drive 'SONY SDT-9000' is no longer found on this machine. If you don't choose another drive, you cannot automatically add tapes to this archive." From kc at omnigroup.com Thu Feb 3 16:28:19 2000 From: kc at omnigroup.com (Ken Case) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:57 2005 Subject: OmniWeb 3.1 release candidate 1 is now available Message-ID: <200002040028.QAA17092@scyther.omnigroup.com> OmniWeb 3.1 release candidate 1 is now available from our web site at http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniweb/download/. Ken Release notes for 3.1 release candidate 1 (also available at http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniweb/releasenotes/): * Added exception handling around several pieces of code which locked the main thread locked so we could no longer potentially lose that lock due to an exception. (This caused hangs in OmniWeb 3.0.2 on OPENSTEP: looking up the width of Unicode characters used in some HTML lists raises an exception.) * The "zoom" (or maximize) window control now tries to resize the window to the smallest size that will eliminate scrollers. (This does not work at all for framesets yet, because we still need to write the logic to determine how big each subframe might actually want to be.) * Fixed right-clicking and control-clicking on image links and image maps so that the destination of the link is now displayed and (on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server) the link context menu appears. (To right click in Mac OS X Server, you must first install the OmniMousePatch driver.) * Improved our handling of embedded objects. We now know about the "type" attribute, and can register plugins based on it. We also changed the display processor so that it passes any additional attributes along to the applet cell, which lets plugins register new attributes on the EMBED tag, and have access to the values of those attributes without having to modify the display processor itself. * On Mac OS X Server 1.0-2, -[NSDate dateByAddingYears:...] will hang forever if the resulting date is within the hour skipped by daylight savings time (it has trouble making the leap). We now work around this by calling -dateByAddingTimeInterval: instead, which doesn't have this problem. (This caused hangs for a lot of people the first time they opened their bookmarks following the Daylight Savings Time change.) * The contents of a