Was considering one of the Drobo units, to take advantage of increasingly cheaper HDD, but didn’t really need the ultimate flexibility, and didn’t want the price either. To not make that decision, I was going to settle for a cheap enclosure/ATA drive. But, while doing my normal surf habit, I saw a reference to Thermaltake BlacX Docking Station and did some research on it. Basically a toaster like unit to swap SATA drives, both 3.5 and 2.5 units. Everything looked good and I started shopping. Found it on Newegg for $37 and picked out a nice (well-reviewed) 750GB SATA drive for $59. Great solution for < $100!

Now, I’ll continue to look for SATA deals and I’m all set to roll over to a new Time Machine backup, or swap in a drive temporarily to copy to/from archives, etc..

Up and running in no time. Flawless.

BTW… Time Machine is a great app… I know, I know, it is just a backup and lots of other solutions out there, but the fact that it comes as part of Max OS X, and extremely simple to plug in a drive and go is tremendous.. Already saved my bacon after my main drive failed. After the drive was replaced, I was up and running after a simple restore from Time Machine — didn’t lose a thing. Actually, in this case, the drive was not completely shot — it wouldn’t boot but I was able to inspect via DiskWarrior (another great tool) and actually made emergency backup from there before I took in for repairs, but ultimately used the restore from Time Machine

Exception in thread "main" org.apache.xmlrpc.client.XmlRpcClientException:
Failed to parse servers response: Unknown type: nil

I posted on the magento forum to no success (except to find a few others with the same problem). So I was on my own..

After some research, I determined that the problem (IMHO) is that the Magento api is incorrectly using the nil type in responses. According to the XML-RPC spec, nil is an extended type, and can only be used with a namespace (e.g. ex:nil) — see the data types section on the apache site. But, luckily, the ws-xmlrpc library can be easily extended to provide a work around, and the following solution worked for me.

All you need to do is extend the builtin TypeFactoryImpl class and the assign the client TypeFactory to your custom class. Most of the work by this custom TypeFactory can be done using the super class, so just check for the incorrect nil usage when getting a parser. e.g the TypeFactory I used :

public class MyTypeFactory extends TypeFactoryImpl {

    public MyTypeFactory(XmlRpcController pController) {
        super(pController);
    }

    @Override
    public TypeParser getParser(XmlRpcStreamConfig pConfig,
      NamespaceContextImpl pContext, String pURI, String pLocalName) {

        if ("".equals(pURI) && NullSerializer.NIL_TAG.equals(pLocalName)) {
            return new NullParser();
        } else {
            return super.getParser(pConfig, pContext, pURI, pLocalName);
        }
    }
}

and then created my XmlRpcClient as follows:

XmlRpcClientConfigImpl config = new XmlRpcClientConfigImpl();
config.setServerURL(new URL("http://mymagentoserver.com/api/xmlrpc/"));
XmlRpcClient client = new XmlRpcClient();
client.setConfig(config);
client.setTypeFactory(new MyTypeFactory(client));

Notes:

• There is a enabledForExtensions property used by the client (and server) classes, which can be set by XmlRpcConfig:: setEnabledForExtensions(), but that has no effect here since the Magento server is doing it wrong.
• You would use a very similar method if you needed to implement a custom type (if your XML-RPC server defined one), but would need to provide a custom TypeSerializer as well, by overriding the getSerializer() method in MyTypeFactory. There is an example of this on the ws-xmlrpc site in the advanced techniques section.

As usual, your milage may vary.

VirutalBox has guest edition software for Windows and Linux which adds nice features such as mouse pointer integration and integrated windows. Plus, sharing host directories is very easy. These features are available in the other commercial virtual host solutions I’ve looked at.

OS installation was a breeze for the Linux distributions, as I simply downloaded the iso images and mounted it as cdrom for the guest installer to use.

With that action, can create static workflow, or can prompt for all the tags to set.