10.5: A possible fix for an iChat 'Camera in use' error
With an Intel iMac running Leopard, I kept getting an error that the built-in iSight was in use. To fix this problem, I now do this from Terminal as an admin user, and I can again use the camera: $ sudo killall VDCAssistant I do not even have to restart iChat for the fix to take effect. The way I deduced this is that I ran sudo lsof | less -i, searched for usb, and found this VDCAssistant process using some VDC (whatever that is) library that the QuickTime component of iChat was using, too. So I decided to kill that process. The system respawns the VDCAssistant process, but after that, the iSight camera can be used again in iChat -- at least until it suddenly becomes unusable again, for no particular reason I can determine.
published on Friday, the 8. August 2008, macosxhints
Use wireless networking in safe boot mode
My friend has a much-loved 12" PowerBook G4. Unfortunately, it has developed a VRAM error (confirmed by Apple Hardware Test) that makes it impossible to boot in "normal" mode. However, it can boot in Safe Mode, which seems to bypass the VRAM. The graphics are obviously not as good, but the computer is quite usable in Safe Mode. My friend wants to use it as a surfing/email computer for his wife -- but doesn't want to shell out the $300+ for a new logic board installation to fix the VRAM. The only problem is that Safe Mode disables wireless networking! I searched in vain (via Google) for any tips to enable AirPort in Safe Mode. After a bit of thinking, I found a way to get wireless running in Safe Mode (on OS X 10.4, at least).Open Terminal and enter:$ sudo kextload /system/library/extensions/appleairport.kext$ sudo kextload /system/library/extensions/appleairport2.kextThen open the Network pane of System Preferences, and ...
published on Monday, the 30. June 2008, macosxhints
A workaround for SMB share disconnects
When mounting an SMB share from a Windows 2003 server, I ran into the problem that after about five minutes, the share would disconnect and I would not be able to reconnect to it at all. My system log would say things like this:KernelEventAgent24 tid 00000000 received VQ_NOTRESP event (1)KernelEventAgent24 tid 00000000 type 'smbfs', mounted on '/Volumes/xxxx', from '//xxxx;xxxx@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xxx$', not responding KernelEventAgent24 tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s) loginwindow23 1 server now unresponsive kernel smb_iod_reconnect: The reconnect failed to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx! error = 4 I found a solution, after trying many other things. It is probably due to a bug in the network software of Apple or the server. I use a laptop which normally uses a wired connection with fixed IP as a first choice, but there is wireless connection in the building, too, and my laptop pulls an IP number from the DHCP server at the same time via ...
published on Friday, the 4. April 2008, macosxhints
Security Update 007-009 finally fixes SMB problem
This is not really a hint, but a happy announcement. Since March 2005, I've been unable to connect to my university's server using SMB via the Finder on Tiger. I'd get a "Mount tree phase error -36," which happened only when connecting thru the Finder -- using the smbclient Terminal command did the trick. I finished my Masters degree, and yet this was still broken in the first release of Leopard. This bug appears to be solved, finally, with the release of Security Update 007-009 for 10.5.1. Maybe the 10.4.11 version fixes Tiger's problem, too, but I can't test that...
published on Wednesday, the 23. January 2008, macosxhints
Another way to use personal web sharing and FileVault
I noticed that Personal Web Sharing was only partially functional when using FileVault. More precisely, accessing the users web pages inside ~/Sites using a URL similar to http://localhost/~username would always fail with a permissions error. The reason for this failure is fairly simple. When the FileVault user logs in, the encrypted disk image /Users/.username/username.sparseimage is mounted as /Users/username. Apple righty decided that a user using FileVault was trying to protect personal data, and so they set the access rights of /Users/username to 700 (rwx------), thus allowing only the user herself to access anything in her $HOME directory. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of preventing the local Apache server from accessing the contents of /Users/username/Sites/ resulting in the aforementioned error. A simple but unsafe solution: A simple solution would be to change the access rights of ...
published on Monday, the 31. December 2008, macosxhints
10.5: Apache 2 site troubles with permissions and folders
Upon upgrading to Leopard via upgrade install, I couldn't get to my Test webserver on my localhost. I got a 403 error, that I wasn't allowed to access my directory. Going to Finder and doing a Get Info on the Sites folder told me that I had read and write privileges, but a user (Unknown) had read privileges. I couldn't remove this user. Clicking the + symbol would crash Finder, every time.The fix to this is to go into Terminal, and from your home folder, type:$ cd ..$ chown -R :staff name_of_home_folderWhere name_of_home_folder is the name of your user's home folder. This will stop Get Info from crashing, but it won't fix the 403 error. Now that 403 error is occurring because Tiger ships with Apache2 and activates it by default, ignoring Apache1.x configuration files -- thanks for making that clear, Apple!To solve that, all you hav...
published on Monday, the 5. November 2007, macosxhints
10.4: Another fix for Windows 2003 share mounting
Many users have problems mounting shares from Windows 2003 Servers from OS X Tiger (10.4 - 10.4.10) clients. The following solution has been tested in our enterprise where we have W2K3 servers, physical as well as virtual, and some within a SAN. Problem: From the network view in OS X, we could browse to the servers, but when we tried to connect, we would get the Delete/Fix Alias error. When connecting from the Finder with Command-K (either with smb://servername, smb://ip.address, smb://servername.fqdn, cifs://servername, etc.), we would get the dreaded Error -36 and the Console would show: mount_smbfs: session setup failed (extended security lookup2): syserr = Socket is not connected mount_smbfs: could not login...
published on Monday, the 20. August 2007, macosxhints
When a 'corrupt' disk image file really isn't corrupt
I recently ran into a problem trying to open a downloaded .dmg (disk image) file: I kept getting a corrupt dmg file message when trying to open it. I downloaded it from several other locations, but the file still refused to open. I checked with a friend of mine on another Mac OS X system, and he downloaded and opened the dmg file with no problem. We compared md5sums of the file, and they were identical.When I tried dragging the file into Disk Utility's left section, and then doing a verify on the dmg file, I'd get a Verify volume failed with error Invalid request (-9998) message. If I did a hdutil attach filename.dmg, it would give the following error:Initializing...Verifying......[trimmed]...Verification completed...calculated CRC32 $ABCDEF12, expected CRC32 $00000000Finishing...hdiutil: attach failed - corrupt imageNote the expected CRC32 checksum was zero (the calculated value was an eight-digit hex, rep...
published on Tuesday, the 12. December 2006, macosxhints
10.4: Update split for large file pieces (2GB+)
As described in this hint, the split utility is a highly-useful tool for splitting a large file into pieces. Recently, however, I discovered that attempting to split a file into pieces 2GB in size or larger fails with an error: $ split -b 2048m somelargefile split: write: Invalid argument This is caused by Apple shipping an older copy of split that uses signed long values for the byte count, limiting it to 2047MB. One workaround is to compile a new split utility that uses 64-bit integers, allowing a much larger byte count. Newer source code may be found on the NetBSD web site. To get the code to compile for Mac OS X, add the following line near the top of the split.c file...
published on Wednesday, the 22. November 2006, macosxhints
10.4: Use of Access Control Lists causes issues with tar
The tar utility in 10.4 is great in that it now supports copying of resource forks. I've used hfstar for a long while, and thought I'd switch this weekend to using the 10.4 version on a newly-acquired Intel iMac. The machine has its internal disk partitioned into three pieces: OS, Users and Media. On the OS and Media partitions, /usr/bin/tar worked fine and preserved resource forks on the backups. On the Users partition, however, it successfully created tar archives, but without resource forks being preserved. It also generated errors of the form: $ tar -cvf test.tar Test Test/ tar: /tmp/tar.md.GPzLI9: Cannot stat: No such file or directory Test/.DS_Store tar: /tmp/tar.md.ayDXd5: Cannot stat: No such file or directory Test/MyCD Test/test.tar tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors I did some googling on the ...
published on Tuesday, the 7. November 2006, macosxhints