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OS X Lion: FileVault-Encrypt external HDD with “Home” on it

July 29th, 2011 | by Sebastian Schack | apple, hacking

Jul
29

UPDATE: The solution described below still works with the just released Mac OS X 10.7.1. (Aug, 16 2011)

So, I have this urge for security when it comes to my personal data. I really love how FileVault2 in OS X 10.7 Lion doesn’t only encrypt the Home directory of a user, but the whole disk instead.
What I learned today: this doesn’t work for power users and if power uses get it to work, there’s a creepy and scary and dangerous monster lurking in the dark. A bug.

This is the story of how I managed to encrypt my external (or rather: second) HDD with the home directory on it, how I rebooted my machine and couldn’t mount that device during boot/login anymore, how I logged in as a second user and couldn’t mount that device anymore (even with superuser privileges), how I almost started crying, how I thanked Steve for TimeMachine and how I found a bug that luckily others found before me and developed workarounds for it.

But let’s do this step by step…

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mds / mdworker running wild on OS X (10.6 AND 10.7) – again

July 8th, 2011 | by Sebastian Schack | apple

Jul
08

Just about a month ago I wrote about a problem I had with the mds process on OS X. That’s the process that indexes your HDD for spotlight.

Mine was running wild then and I found a way to fix it. Now, after the last system update, this was happening again. I tried to apply the same fix – only to see, that the update didn’t change anything about my settings there.

I disabled all aspects of spotlight, one item at a time (disallowing it to search Applications, Contacts, … until I was down to “Messages”). Didn’t help. Rebooting did – for a few minutes. Oddly enough, this didn’t happen on my second machine which runs (almost) the exact same software.

So I figured that something on my HDD (which is actually an SSD) must undergo constant changes so that spotlight would have to index it over and over again. While thinking about that, mds stopped and went down to a CPU usage of 0,0%.

I waited about an hour and it was up to 104,7% again (plus 63% for mdworker). By then I already had found the solution and had only waited for mds running wild again so I could verify my theory…

I’m a long time customer at Backblaze – an online backup service provider. The backblaze application constantly watches over changes on my system and, if it found any, encypts the newly added/created files and uploads them to a backblaze server. The tempory data needed to do this is being stored in USER/Library/backblaze. After adding this folder in the “Privacy” tab of spotlight’s settings in System Preferences, mds IMMEDIATELY went to to 3,4%, then 2,0% and finally to 0,3% CPU usage.

I don’t know why this started happening just now. I don’t know wether this is happening only on one of machines. But I’m 99,9% sure that this did the trick.

So if you’re using backblaze on a Mac with spotlight and experience mds/mdworker running wild from time to time or even regularly – you might want to give my solution a shot.

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Make Dropbox run on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion – Developer Preview 2 (11A419)

April 1st, 2011 | by Sebastian Schack | apple, hacking

Apr
01

UPDATE
The guys at dropbox delivered a new version of their incredibly cool software yesterday. Dropbox Version 1.1.3 runs without you having to “hack” anything on OS X 10.7 (Lion) Developer Preview 2. Have fun with it.

If you’re using Apple’s latest developer preview of OS X 10.7 (Lion), you’ve probably run into this problem: if you want to start Dropbox, it will tell you that you cannot run Dropbox on this version of OS X – and just quit.

Here’s how to fix it:
First, install the latest version of Dropbox (1.1.7).

Second, right click on “Dropbox” in your Applications folder. Choose “Show Package Contents”. Open the folder “Contents” and then open “Info.plist” in an editor of your choice.
In there, replace all occurences of the string “1.1.7″ with “2.1.0″, save, RESTART YOUR COMPUTER, and you should be good to go.
I didn’t find this solution on my own, but I thought it could be helpful to have this information available somewhere on the internet besides the official forums.

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Enable TRIM Support for ANY SSD in OS X 10.6 / 10.7

March 28th, 2011 | by Sebastian Schack | apple, hacking, hardware

Mar
28

UPDATE: Also works perfectly well on 10.7 Developers Preview 2 (11A419).

If you read my German articles, you probably already read that I’m by now the proud owner of a SSD which I replaced my DVD Super-Mega-Hyper-whatever-drive inside my MacBook Pro.

The Crucial RealSSD C300 does come with a chip that supports TRIM in and out of it’s own – however, Apple, so far, enabled SSD support in it’s OS X operating system only for a couple of selected SSDs. Those, those they equip their MacBooks themselves with.

This little tool called TRIM ENABLER circumvents these limitations and enables SSD TRIM support in OS X 10.6 AND 10.7 (tested it myself) for ANY SSD out there on the market. Thank you for your great work, Oskar Groth.

Proof screenshot:

MacBook Pro SSD TRIM

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Prediction: Apple’s OS X will remain “OS X”

December 10th, 2010 | by Sebastian Schack | apple

Dec
10

I’m just writing this down so that I can go and tell you “Told you so” in a year or two.

I predict that there will never be a “OS XI” or “OS 11″ from Apple. “OS X” is a brand that has gained a pretty good reputation over the last decade. They won’t chance the number in front of the comma, but they might go and make some geeks and nerds jump out of their windows by naming a release OS X 10.10 (which, in a decimal system, would be the same as 10.1 which was already released in late 2001 (“Puma”). Subsequent releases would then be named 10.11, 10.12 etc.

Or they drop the version numbering entirely and just go with animals. They didn’t announce their next release, 10.7, as “OS X 10.7″ but, if I remember correctly, solely as “OS X Lion”.

Of course, all of the above only applies if they don’t drop the “OS X” part and just go with “iOS” for all their devices instead.

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Moving iTunes playlists to another computer

September 28th, 2010 | by Sebastian Schack | apple

Sep
28

So I have this friend, I created a lot of playlists as the digital equivalent to old school mixtapes for. She didn’t want to use iTunes for some time now so in the past she would just give me her iPod, I would then plug it in to my Mac, sync the newly created playlist(s) to the device and she was good to go.

Now, she decided to start using iTunes and asked me for the playlists, so that she could copy them into her iTunes. And that’s were the trouble began…

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WWDC 2010 – My “predictions”

June 7th, 2010 | by Sebastian Schack | apple, iphone

Jun
07

This is absolutely NOT worth reading if you’re looking for any kind of information! It’s something like my own, personal bingo card for this year’s WWDC.

1. New iPhone (Probability: 99,9999999999%)
No secret. Steve Jobs will present the iPhone 3GS’s successor. Period. If not, those present will jump the stage and will make sure that he’ll need another liver after the presentation. Bonus points for me if Steve should decide to present the new iPhone as an encore, his famous “one more thing.

2. New Mac Mini (20%)
The Mac Mini, in its latest iteration, is already 230 days old. An upgrade should be right ahead. Thus, it’s very likely that Steve will present the new model. On the other hand: the new Mac Mini won’t be revolutionary in any kind of way. I don’t think that the new Mac Mini will be WWDC-Keynote-worthy. The new iMacs and the new MacBook and the new MacBookPros all were silently upgraded, too.

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