OSX 10.5.7 Update Issues

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Technology How To's, troubleshooting 0 Comment

OSX 10.5.7 Update Issues

It’s comforting to know that when Apple screws up, they do it but good.

Not since the days of Tiger has a dot release from Apple done so much damage. On the surface, 10.5.7 is a very important update. A lists of fixes includes the usual round of security fixes, fixes for network performance, updates for Camera RAW support, among several other fixes. But, initially the Software Update version was throwing up errors “digital signature for the package is incorrect.” Apple rapidly fixed this but it underscores the importance of having good backups and a clean file system.

Afterwards, others started reporting BSOD or Blue Screens of Death after the update was done. Having originated on Windows, the BSOD is now available in Leopard, a nice, if unintended bonus from Apple.

Luckily this problem seems to be fairly easy to fix:

  • Wait for Hard drive access to stop
  • Hold Power button down until computer shuts off
  • Hold shift button down and power computer on to boot into safe mode
  • Use regular user name and password to login if asked
  • type reboot to reboot the computer

    • The next issue to commonly pop up is messed up display resolutions for non-Apple monitors. People are finding themselves stuck in 1920×1080! Resetting the PRAM (Hold down the Command, Option P and K keys while booting until it chimes three or four times) seems to fix for some.

    For some of us REALLY unluckily people, the update gets stuck part way. After letting it sit for an hour at 33% there was no choice but to reboot the computer. Upon booting back up, OS X is not able to fully boot up. In one machine I was able to fix by going into safe mode, then issuing the softwareupdate -l -a command to finish the download and install.

    On my Macbook, it was a full reinstall.

    How To: Use Google to search Usenet Archives

    Posted by Rick on in google, Technology How To's 2 Comments

    How To: Use Google to search Usenet Archives

    Usenet’s usability has degraded a lot in recent years. But back in it’s day it was probably the most useful tool to share knowledge around. The grains of knowledge contained in Usenet even now are immeasurable.

    So go to: http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?q=&

    And you’ll be presented with Google’s Advanced Search. This one has several additional options to help find information. Subject, Author, and even dates are possible. But the hidden feature is the groups section. Instead of just Google Groups, any newsgroup name can be used such as alt.religion.

    Enter in your requested search terms, modify the advanced search options, hit OK and be amazed at the power that is Google Search.

    Missing Garage Band Loops in Leopard

    Posted by Rick on in Apple, Technology How To's 4 Comments

    Missing Garage Band Loops in Leopard

    In GarageBand 4 (part of iLife 09) it’s easy to have issues with the sound loops. There are after all over two gigabytes of them. On top of that when first installing iLife you may want to opt out of installing all them to save space. To make things confusing, when Garage Band is uninstalled some of the more popular loops are still present.

    Usually just clicking on a missing loop will trigger GarageBand to attempt to install them from the iLife DVD, or better yet via Software Update. But this does not always work. In addition, manually reinstalling iLife does not fix either.

    To get this auto-install to work again open up the loop library in GarageBand. (It’s the eye icon) In finder go to /Library/Application Support/Garageband/ drag the Sound Loops folder into the loop library portion of Garageband. This will recreate the index files of all the loops. In some cases you may need to delete the Index out of /Library/Application Support/Garageband/ first.

    After the index is recreated, click on one of the missing loops again. Tell GarageBand to reinstall. Once it does the full range of loops will be back. Keep in mind that the download is 1.1GB in size, so installing off the iLife DVD may be faster.

    How To: Change Default Mail Client on OSX

    Posted by Rick on in Apple, Leopard, OSX, Technology How To's 0 Comment

    How To: Change Default Mail Client on OSX 

    When I moved away from Entourage to Thunderbird I had a huge issue with mailto: html links still attempting to open Entourage to send emails. OS X itself simply does not provide a simple way to change this default behavior.

    So, the trick is to open OS X’s Mail Client and use that. Simply create a dummy account, it doesn’t matter what info you put in as you won’t be using it. Once Mail is opened, go to Preferences then click on the General Tab. There will be a “Default Mail Reader” drop down menu. Choose your default client (even Firefox or Safari if you have something like Zimbra or another web mail) and exit the client.

    The other, and possibly better trick if you’re going to make this change across multiple computers such as an entire Enterprise setup is to edit one of the plist files.

    In ~/Library/Preferences/ look for com.apple.LaunchServices.plist

    Add

        LSHandlerRoleAll
    com.mail.client
    LSHandlerURLScheme
    mailto

    Just under
    LSHandlers


    Options for mail client would be com.mozilla.firefox or com.microsoft.entourage or the preferences name of any other mail client. These can easily be found in the same folder. Once this is done, mailto: links will then open in your preferential mail client!

    How To: Use Dump to back up a full filesystem

    Posted by Rick on in FreeBSD, GPL, Linux, Technology How To's, Unix 0 Comment

    How To: Use Dump to back up a full filesystem

    Way back in the day when tape drives first started being heavily used to do backups of Unix machines, the dump command was created. In typical Unix simplicity the dump command “dumps” files from one device to another device. This can be a tape drive, a hard drive, even a network share. rsync does a similar process but is meant for immediate use of those files.

    First step is to be sure dump is installed. If not use, rpm, yum, port, apt-get, or your local repository method to install dump on your system.

    The quickest command to get started is: dump -0 -j9 -f /pathtosavebackup /pathtobackup

    This would give us a down and dirty dump of the requested path, or if / is used in the second part of the command, the full file system starting at the root.

    -j9 tells the command to compress (using tar) the file as much as possible.

    -f defines the device (or filesystem path) to dump too. Keep in mind that this command could not be used to dump files from the local filesystem back to the local filesystem.

    The bad news is that this will take quite a while depending on how much data needs to be dumped, how fast the hard drives (or tape drive) is, and if backing up to a network share, how fast the ethernet connection is. In my tests 100gb filesystem got compressed down to 23gb, and took about fives hours across a 10/100 connection.

    After the dump is done, tar can be used to unarchive the file to a new file system.