macOS and Mac Software: We still exist!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > macOS and Mac Software: We still exist!

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Sulk posted:

I wish Active Directory binding worked correctly in Lion. I've been having a lot of trouble setting it up on a number of machines; a bunch connected after I found some workarounds, but now I have at least a couple which are giving me trouble and won't connect to the authentication server.

I've been having problems binding to AD at all since I updated to 10.7.1. In 10.7.0 I could bind to AD fine but had to manually set the search paths or it'd never authenticate. 10.7.1 can't even find a DC to bind to at all.

From developer chatter, I've heard that 10.7.2's fixed a lot of this (and apparently has drivers for the new MBA's and Mini's, which is nice) and that binding works properly again, although search paths working properly is still touch and go.

Out of curiosity, what workarounds were you using to bind onto AD?

# ¿ Aug 30, 2011 23:45

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 15:02

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Sulk posted:

Great List of steps

That's a really awesome guide for binding a Mac to AD, but unfortunately for me, I'm already doing all of that stuff and still no dice

In my specific case, it fails at the Bind step with either a 'can't find a valid authentication server' error or an 'unable to bind to the specified domain' message, even when I specify a DC to bind to.

Edit: Actually, I figured I'd give this a go on my own laptop (also running 10.7.1) over VPN and it's worked fine without me doing anything other than opening Directory Utility and binding through there. Maybe I've broken something when building our SOE image that I deploy through NetRestore. Time for more testing tomorrow.

Mercurius fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Aug 31, 2011

# ¿ Aug 31, 2011 10:13

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Sulk posted:

I get similar error messages, unable to connect to with server or can't store password. Repairing permissions does nothing, it seems, unless it can't be done from an account. It's really frustrating because I really want/need to get them more easily connected. It seemed like a bunch of them conneted at first, and then the rest didn't. I have no idea what the deal is and how to resolve it barring waiting for 10.7.2.

What do you do for VPN? Cisco or something? The VPN we usually use is Windows only so I need another solution.

Yeah, I don't really have proper Mac infrastructure in place but I was hoping to bind the laptops to AD and use mobile accounts so my users can access the same DFS shares as our Windows computers.

As for VPN, we use an older Cisco system which Snow Leopard/Lion's native VPN client can connect to. Lion seems to have partially broken the VPN support now though and I'm having to forcibly disable split-tunneling as because without it Lion apparently doesn't pick up that there's jumps past the first subnet that the VPN drops the machine on and won't send traffic to them (or our DNS servers, which are past that point).

# ¿ Sep 1, 2011 00:49

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

You Am I posted:

I was interested in seeing what Parallels 7 vs. VMWare 4 war was going to be like. I always found VMWare 3 to be clunky compared to Parallels 5 and 6.

I've got both Parallels 7 and VMware Fusion 4 and like Grayham I much prefer Parallels. I really dislike the VM creation process in Fusion as all the individual options like Network and CPU are their own little sub-menus (like how Office for Mac does preferences) whereas Parallels just has General/Hardware/Options and has all the relevant things in a list. I've also found the video performance to be significantly better in Parallels and as mentioned it plays much better with Lion's Fullscreen mode. I don't run it in Coherence mode, so having it self contained in its own space works really nicely.

The only benefit of Fusion I've found so far is the fact that the VMs it creates are compatible with other VMware products. Except, you know, you can't run OSX VMs on Workstation or ESXi, so it's not really much of a benefit.

Performance wise for Parallels 7, I managed to get a Lion Server VM running as an OD master, a Windows Server 2008R2 server running AD and a Lion client in a virtual magic triangle and all running at the same time with no issues (other than AD binding on Lion still being poo poo) on my 2011 MBP (i7, 8GB of RAM, 1GB 6750M).

So yeah, pretty impressed with the new version of Parallels so far. Windows 8 Dev Preview also works fine in both Parallels 7 and Fusion 4 if you're into that sort of thing (can't install parallels/vmware tools in either though).

# ¿ Sep 20, 2011 03:57

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

jink posted:

This is a major fix for me; I despise Lion's full screen support with a passion as I primarily use it on my dual monitor setup!

I've been running my MBP in clamshell mode attached to a 27" screen and completely forgot that full screen mode sucks with multiple monitors. It's good to see that Parallels are at least adding the option back in.

For those wondering, Fusion doesn't use Lion's fullscreen mode at all, so those of you who don't like it shouldn't have any issues with that either.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2011 08:29

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Martytoof posted:

Nah, that's the shared secret portion and it's already filled out. I'm reading more about it and it looks like it's a policy thing so I might be boned. Thanks anyway though.

If that's an older Cisco IPSec VPN you're connecting to, it's been set to prompt for the password each time on the actual VPN endpoint itself. Ours is exactly the same at work.

I also found that Lion won't route traffic past the VLAN the VPN server puts clients on if split tunneling isn't disabled, which is incredibly irritating. No, Apple, I don't want to send 100% of my Internet traffic through the work VPN :mad:

# ¿ Sep 29, 2011 23:15

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Lion's recovery partition is only hidden in Disk Utility as far as I know. It shows up for me when holding down alt/option while booting and also in Startup Disk in System Preferences on several different Macs.

If it's not showing up in either of those places then it sounds like it didn't get created for whatever reason. I don't think there's any way to get it on without reinstalling Lion unfortunately.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2012 01:40

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

BlackMK4 posted:

gently caress.

I think rEFIt might allow you to boot from windows USB installation sticks: http://refit.sourceforge.net/

# ¿ Jan 10, 2012 06:24

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Wall of text warning, probably won't be interesting if you don't care about Macs and AD

Green Puddin posted:

Hey guys, excuse me if this is going to sound completely stupid but hear me out; I'm an intern and have been given a task to try and integrate some iMac computers and a Mac Mini server onto the main Active Directory for the school (and I have a Windows brain).

So far I have found the Directory Utility and found out the last guy working on these tried to connect the Macs to a directory that doesn't even exist at the school anymore. Unbinding and binding the Mac to the correct directory, I logged out of the administrator account and logged in to the machine with my student credentials (having to type in "directory name/user name".

So far so good!

Now, on all of the Active Directory profiles users are given access to the schools U: drive, basically a network drive where they can throw all of their poo poo onto it. I poked around Finder but had no luck accessing such drives. Now here comes my question:

If I were to use something like Samba to mount the network location, could I put that into a start up script so when users first log in they will either see their drive icon on the Desktop or in their documents under Finder? I'm not shy on using the terminal, so anything would be much appreciated.

I deal with a similar situation at the university I work at (AD only, we don't have many Mac users any more but naturally they all want access to the same network resources as the Windows users) so I'll go through what we did to achieve this sort of thing.

There's a few different ways you can achieve mapping the network location depending on the version of OS X that you're using, but there's also a few other things you can do that'll make the Macs play nicer with Active Directory. Lion (at least from 10.7.2 onwards) is probably the best as far as AD feature support goes, but it's also buggy and temperamental. Snow Leopard tends to be fairly solid and compatible with more types of file servers, but it doesn't support stuff like DFS. Leopard's like Snow Leopard but less reliable so I'd suggest you avoid it if at all possible.

If you're lucky enough to be using Lion (I can't remember if Snow Leopard did this but I don't think so) and your user accounts have the 'Map X drive to <server>' set, by default Lion will automatically connect to that server and put it in a folder in the dock. If it doesn't map automatically or you don't have the AD option set, you can manually connect to the server by going (in Finder) Go->Connect to Server and then specifying your Windows Share in smb://servername/sharename format. Alternatively, you can create an AppleScript to run at login which will connect to the share automatically and (optionally) create a desktop alias to make it easier to get to.

If you're looking at going down the script to map shares route (which should work with any version of OS X), Active Directory helpfully creates accounts with the shortname of the user object which enables you to use one script to map a drive for everyone, provided your storage is organised (eg \\server\users\username where you can simply replace the username for everyone). Fire up AppleScript Editor (/Applications/Utilities) and use something like the following (replacing relevant servers/shares for your environment):

code:

set short_name to system attribute "USER"

try
 mount volume "smb://server/users/" & short_name
end try

Hit compile and save the script as either an application or a script called something like Map Drive. Ideally, when run it should just quietly connect to the server in the background and map the share without popping up anything on screen. User authentication should be passed through from AD so hopefully you won't get any credential prompt either. Check the sidebar in Finder to see if it's connected successfully.

If it all works and does what you want, you can add it to Login Items for the user to get it to automatically map their drive every time they log in. If you want everyone to get it, you can drop it somewhere like the /Applications folder (make sure everyone's got read/execute permissions to it) and add it to the default user template's login items (a decent guide on this can be found here) so new users that log in get it automatically mapped (if they're not using Lion anyway).

After you get the drive mapping stuff working, there's some other things you can do with the Binding options in Directory Utility that'll change how your Macs work on AD. The main stuff you want is in the User Experience tab of the Advanced Options section but there's also some useful stuff in Administrative, especially if you're binding as part of a multi-domain forest like our environment.

User Experience

Create mobile account at login: this allows you to use AD pretty much only for authentication. It'll still connect your home directory (in Lion, anyway) but it doesn't allow your home directory folders to run directly from the server your AD home directory is on. This mode also allows for cached authentication so it's really good for laptop users (although they'll need to be connected to the network the first time they log in so the account can be cached). I tend to leave the prompt to create an account on in case desktop users don't want to use a mobile account.
Force local home directory on startup disk: Stops your home folders from being stored and run directly from your fileserver. This option is forced on and greyed out when mobile accounts are enabled.
Use UNC path from Active Directory: Maps your home drive in AD. Doesn't do anything if the option isn't set in AD. Don't pick AFP if your server doesn't support it (most Windows based fileservers don't).
Default user shell: I'd leave this alone unless your users are heavy terminal users and you want to troll them by switching their default shell to zsh.

Administrative

Prefer this domain server: Always authenticate against a specific Domain Controller. You're unlikely to need this.
Allow administration by: This lets you add AD users/groups as administrators for the machine
Allow authentication from any domain in the forest: If you're in a multi-domain environment like we are, you probably want to stop anyone that isn't from your specific domain from logging in.

The basic gist of the above settings is that by default (if the Map Home Drive option in AD is set on the user account) the Mac will use AD for authentication and will attempt to put everything in the user directory on the user's home (U: in the above example). This can get problematic with space usage because most user drives have quotas and people have a tendency to load music/photos onto Macs regardless of whether they're work computers or not. Credentials in this mode are not cached at all, so if there's no connection to the network you can't log in and if you're already logged in and the network drops out the whole system freezes and you get the spinning wheel. This doesn't use the local machine's user template and just creates one that looks identical to the one you get when you start up a Mac for the first time. A major advantage to this is that since your data is stored on the network you can sit down at any Mac on AD and have instant access to your stuff.

What we use at work is mobile accounts (even for desktops) which still uses AD for authentication but stores everything in the user profile locally in the /Users folder. This has the advantage of caching credentials, not having to worry about profile space and allowing you to continue working when the network's disconnected but none of the data is stored on the network by default (so it isn't backed up) and each Mac you log into has completely different settings. On the plus side, this method picks up the default user template when you log in so you can actually customise stuff and have the settings stick.

Our setup is host machines as Lion (all 10.7.2 at this stage) with mobile accounts, leaving Lion to automatically map the home drive and I've customised the default profile to have a bunch of aliases to scripts on the desktop that users can run the first time they log in which map their home drive (and DFS-based shared drive), create an alias to their home drive and then remove the shortcut I placed on the desktop. We've got our users trained to save everything onto the network anyway and they've learned to accept that if they've got local data and something goes wrong with the machine, their stuff's gone.

That should cover the basics for now but there's other stuff you can do regarding DFS and AD/OD hybrid authentication that's annoying to get working properly that I'll leave for now unless you actually want to know about that stuff.

Mercurius fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Feb 8, 2012

# ¿ Feb 8, 2012 11:12

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Martytoof posted:

Awesome, I'll try to automate this somehow. Thanks!

I think if you stick something like the following into AppleScript Editor and save it as an application it'll work:

code:

do shell script "arch -arch i386 /Applications/appname.app/Contents/MacOS/appname &"

# ¿ Feb 9, 2012 03:03

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

YO MAMA HEAD posted:

Any idea why my iMessages wouldn't be updating on my iPhone? Sending works as expected but it doesn't seem aware of my other device (sending or receiving).

You're definitely signed into the same iCloud/Apple ID account on your phone and your Mac?

The other thing it might be is that by default the phone sends from your phone number rather than your Apple ID. Someone mentioned on the previous page that if you go into Settings->Messages (and also Facetime) that you can change the caller ID (at the bottom of the options screens, you might need to scroll down) of the phone's messages to your Apple ID which should make all messages sent/received to all your devices.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2012 22:24

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Jolan posted:

I searched around and found that HiDPI might be available after installing dev tools, so I got XCode but it didn't change anything. Are there any such tools you've got installed?

Once you have XCode installed, you'll need to go into Quartz Debug (which I think is in /Developer/Applications depending on version) and turn on HiDPI support.

As far as I'm aware Lion doesn't have it enabled out of the box.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2012 21:27

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

jihad_jain posted:

Well, something weird is going on with my main account on my Mac.

Finder keeps crashing constantly upon login, with the icons on my desktop pretty much blinking on and off at about once a second.

It doesn't happen on the other accounts on here, and nothing I've done from googling around has helped at all (verifying disk/repairing disk, which said the disk was fine)

I'm on a mid-2007 2,1 Macbook on 10.6.8.

Sounds like something might've gone wonky with the com.apple.Finder.plist file in your ~/Library/Preferences folder. Maybe see if you can rename it from one of the other accounts and see if that fixes the problem?

# ¿ Mar 20, 2012 08:04

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Sonic Dude posted:

It's working because that setting was in there before you upgraded. New 802.1X settings have to come from .mobileconfig files, which can be created relatively easily with iPCU. I think the arbitrary-seeming restriction is Apple's way of getting people to switch away from MCX managed preferences and onto their new preferred device-management system.

in addition to this, the 802.1X support in Lion (and iOS 5) is much better at auto-negotiating the security when you give it your username and password than it was in Snow Leopard.

I work at a university that supports eduroam and previously people had to set up their own 802.1X settings before it would connect. These days it just asks for a username and password on first connection and auto configures both PEAP/MS-CHAP and TTLS/PAP on its own, even on new or freshly imaged machines.

# ¿ May 1, 2012 22:07

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

kim jong-illin posted:

Hit a really weird Safari bug: I can't download any .dmg files any more.

Happened out of the blue, Safari either just displays a dark grey background or loops back to the download page when I try to download a .dmg file. I've disabled all extensions, reinstalled Safari and reinstalled OS X Lion with no success.

I can't download another browser to find out what's going on because Safari won't let me do it. I don't have any download managers or anything installed that might cause this.

When you reinstalled OS X, did you use time machine to copy your user account across? It sounds like the preferences for Safari are broken and if you restored your user account (or are still using the same user account from before the reinstall), the preferences won't have changed so you'd still have the problem.

The easiest way to test if it's account based is to make another user account through System Preferences->Accounts, log into that and try and download a .dmg file in Safari. If it works fine, then the preferences on your normal account are busted. If that's the case you can try resetting Safari's preferences by selecting the Safari menu and clicking on Reset Safari, making sure everything's ticked then hitting Reset.

If that doesn't fix it, you can manually recreate the preferences for Safari by opening Finder, holding down alt/option, clicking the Go menu and selecting Library (since it's hidden by default in Lion), opening the Preferences folder, dragging the com.apple.Safari.plist file to the desktop and then opening Safari and trying a .dmg download again. It's probably best to have Safari closed while doing this, and you may find that some of your basic settings revert back to defaults.

Give it a try and let us know how you go.

Mercurius fucked around with this message at 23:31 on May 22, 2012

# ¿ May 22, 2012 23:28

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Bob Morales posted:

This is the reason I only back up my documents, desktop, and downloads folders with TM

Yeah, I don't really think there's much reason to back up the library folder unless you're using POP mail in Apple Mail or something.

As an aside, I find that VMware Fusion is currently the best virtualisation software on the Mac for performance, but I prefer Parallels' interface and features. If you use Fusion, you should check out VMware's 2012 Fusion Tech Preview and give them feedback on any bugs you find so they can fix them before release. The Tech Preview does a really nice job on virtualising Windows 8 and Mountain Lion if you're looking at playing or testing with those.

# ¿ May 23, 2012 03:11

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Martytoof posted:

I don't know, my ML VM is at work and I'm not there right now. Somehow I doubt it, though.

Posted mostly for the benefit of someone who might be interested in trying Fusion without paying for it until October. Not sure what you're using now so I can't really comment on whether it'll be better or not.

The 3D acceleration thing is off by default when making an OS X VM. I toggled it on but I don't know if it actually does anything.

I've found Fusion more reliable in general than Parallels for OS X VMs as I tend to get weird stuff happening in Parallels like changing the resolution will increase the size the VM is on screen but doesn't appear to scale the area the mouse clicks are registered in which makes it difficult to actually do anything on the VM unless it's fullscreened. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I've found both Lion and Mountain Lion VMs work better in Fusion and work significantly better in the Tech Preview.

# ¿ May 23, 2012 05:10

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Sprat Sandwich posted:

I like using Adium and I think it could be great, but when I opened up my Mac it displayed 13 messages that had been sent last evening and I didn't get, two of them where 'Hi..-s' so now people think I don't want to talk to them

I mean MSN chat is still a pretty big thing, isn't it?

I'm going to try Trillian later.

I've been using Cocoon, which is a plugin for iChat that allows it to connect to MSN. Seems to work fine with both iChat and the Messages beta.

I have to say, I actually really like the Messages beta. It works well with Facebook/MSN (with the plugin) and you can send/receive iMessages to other iOS/Messages users from the same place. It's also got a nicer interface than iChat (in my opinion, anyway).

# ¿ May 31, 2012 23:51

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Evis posted:

There's the tech preview http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/fusiontp2012 of the next versions of Fusion/Workstations which are supposed to support W8. If you want the Windows 8 Release Preview to work with Fusion 4.1.2 you can add the following line to your .vmx file and it should fix it. (It worked for me)
code:
vmGenCounter.enable = "FALSE"

I also needed to do this for the Tech Preview.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2012 03:17

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

echobucket posted:

It means you can drag an app over to a second monitor and hit the fullscreen button and it'll go fullscreen on that monitor instead of the primary one. I couldn't get it to do anything more than that. I've said too much probably.

That's pretty much all anyone wanted. At the moment in Lion, one screen has the fullscreen app and the other is full of the grey linen pattern rendering your second monitor totally useless.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2012 06:49

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Ugh, I was hoping they were making it so you could have a fullscreen space app on one with a normal desktop space on the other.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2012 07:49

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Factory Factory posted:

Growly's export doesn't look like it does one thing I absolutely need, which is be able to access my notes on my desktop (a PC) both regularly and in case of Critical Laptop Failure (dropped, stolen, or otherwise borked). Even if I were to Hackintosh or replace it with a Mac, it seems like sync would rely rather unrobustly on DropBox, SpiderOak, or an unsupported jimmying of iCloud.

I'm not sure I'm not-paranoid enough to accept that.

I've been using OneNote synced to SkyDrive through a Windows VM for note-taking (which also allows it to be synced to my work PC) and unfortunately, I really haven't found anything that does everything that it does as well. Evernote is sort of alright for basic note-taking but I find it's lacking some of the more advanced stuff OneNote has

One thing to remember is that if you do end up syncing your OneNote notebooks to SkyDrive, you can open them on either an iPhone or iPad using the official MS OneNote app. Of course, this means that you have to use SkyDrive.

Hopefully they'll include it in the next version of Mac Office.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2012 09:10

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Laserface posted:

Can anyone recommend an MSN chat client that is not adium and does the following?

allows custom text sizing in both typing and chat window
tabbed chat windows
minimal fluff (display icons, chat buttons)

MSN for mac is literally better than the windows version by a million miles, I just wish it would remember that I want to hide the stupid pop-out display icon tray and give me the option to choose the color of the chat window.

alternatively if there is also a A-patch style thing for MSN on mac then just give me that.

I personally use Cocoon, which is a plugin for iChat and the upcoming Messages in Mountain Lion that allows them to connect to MSN. I actually liked the way Messages/Cocoon handled IM so much I stopped using Adium altogether.

Messages was also available as a beta for Lion but I think that's finished now (although I think a link to the installer was floating around a few pages back) and it seemed to do everything you want with the added bonuses of being able send iMessages directly to iPhone/iPad users and hook into jabber chat servers like Facebook.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2012 22:37

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

And the app store download is 4.34GB.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2012 02:24

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Binary Badger posted:

Anyone tried Apple Remote Desktopping into a ML machine?

ML requires a newer version of ARD (3.6). The application's available for download to developers but I think you'll probably have to wait until ML is actually released to the public before the updates hits for everyone else. I assume you can still use the VNC server but I've never really bothered with that.

Mug posted:

How can I remote desktop into my Mac from Windows?

OS X has a built in VNC server that you can use by going to System Preferences->Sharing->Remote Management->Computer Settings and turning on 'VNC viewers may control screen with password'. Once you've done that, all you need is a VNC client for Windows and the IP address of your Mac (you might need to forward port 5900 through your router if you want to do this over the Internet). I've used RealVNC before, but there's quite a lot of others.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2012 01:31

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Communist posted:

Same thing happened to me. I had to go from SL -> Lion -> Mountain Lion

The ESD file from the ML GM installer package didn't really work for me when restoring it using disk utility as it either errored out during the restore or got stuck on the above installing screen. I had the same problem with ML dev preview 4 so I wonder if they've changed something about the DMG itself.

I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner instead, which worked perfectly.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2012 22:09

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Experto Crede posted:

Which mac specifically? All macs have basically the same bootloader, there's no reason apple would arbitrarily not support USB booting on a single one.

Actually, the BootCamp assistant will only let you create bootable Windows USB sticks on Macs that don't have an optical drive (Mac Mini, MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro). I don't know if it does something strange to the boot stick, but I haven't been able to get a normal USB boot stick created with the Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool to work on any of the Macs with optical drives that we have at work.

Having said that, you can create Lion/Mountain Lion boot sticks and they'll work on all Macs.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2012 00:08

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

lord funk posted:

Nope and nope. Still restores at each launch.

So I guess I have to literally find an old Mac, install my copy of Snow Leopard, and grab TextEdit from there?

Did you try RestoreMeNot like SWSP suggested?

# ¿ Jul 21, 2012 00:27

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

~Coxy posted:

Safari 6 questions:

Any way to disable smooth scrolling?
Any way to de-integrate the omnibar again?

VMWare Fusion:

I just updated it and Fullscreen mode is now the lovely Apple version. Any way to revert that functionality?

I'm not sure how to do the Safari stuff but you can disable the fullscreen thing through the view menu while the VM's running:

# ¿ Jul 23, 2012 00:40

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Hello Spaceman posted:

Holy poo poo.

Also, if you prefer to use keyboard shortcuts and you're a contortionist you can use Shift+Option+Command+S as Save As.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2012 08:11

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Mr Man posted:

With "clamshell mode" as someone called it earlier..is there any way that I can connect up my macbook air and wake it up without opening it?

It seems that I can never get it to turn on, I constantly leave the MBA open whilst using the second display as a primary.

My setup is

USB Mac Keyboard
Magic Mouse
thunderbolt - to - hdmi - to - my monitor
and its connected to power.

I use my retina MBP and the MBP I had before it in clamshell all the time. There's two different ways to go about it depending on whether you're starting from it turned off or asleep:

Powered off: make sure all your peripherals, the power and your monitor are plugged in, turn the laptop on and immediately close the lid. If you've done it correctly, the white startup screen with the grey Apple should appear on your monitor and the Apple on the lid of your MacBook shouldn't be glowing because the screen should be off
Asleep/already turned on: Close the lid, make sure the computer is sleeping, connect your peripherals/monitor/power and then either press a key on your keyboard or click your Magic Mouse. If this doesn't work, you may need to enable 'Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer' in the Advanced Bluetooth preferences

Edit: check to make sure you've got the latest EFI for your Mac through Software Update as well

# ¿ Jul 29, 2012 23:44

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Small White Dragon posted:

Any Retina Mac owners that use Windows periodically? Trying to decide whether I want to go the Bootcamp or VMWare route.

Depends entirely on what you're doing in Windows. I've found normal computer usage in VMs is excellent (the Windows 7 VM on my work MBPR is faster than my old C2D Dell Optiplex although that's mainly the SSD) but if you're doing anything graphically intensive like CAD or heavy Photoshop work it'll chug and I'd probably recommend against virtualisation.

If you're thinking about Windows games Bootcamp is your only real option as you'll run into limitations with the amount of video RAM VMs can use.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2012 09:39

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Thoom posted:

I don't think either Parallels or VMWare supports suspending/resuming a VM backed by BootCamp. That's a pretty big deal.

I'm also pretty sure that you can't snapshot or rollback your BootCamp partition.

I'm curious: the guys who are arguing that BootCamp is always better than a VM, do you actually own a RMBP or have you used a VM that's running on a computer with a SSD? Small White Dragon asked specifically about the RMBP and running VMs on SSDs makes them just as fast as BootCamp for stuff that doesn't require a lot of video memory or 3D graphics performance.

jwoven posted:

So is there a way to disable the restoring windows when you restart? I can't find the option anymore. It's not in General, like the internet seems to say.

If you're talking about restoring windows when restarting the computer, you'll get the option when you actually go to log out, restart or shutdown. If you just mean within applications, the option is still in General and it's called 'Close windows when quitting an application' in Mountain Lion.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2012 23:25

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Viktor posted:

Weird issue but cannot find a fix.

Ever since the Mountain Lion update on my laptop the primary display its a gray background no matter what you attempt to set it to. The extended display shows a normal background and is changeable. If I switch the primary display from the laptop LCD to the external display the gray background follows the dock.

Note this only happened on any laptop's upgraded to ML and reproducible, any tips on which plist to kill?

That happened to me in Dev Preview 4 of Mountain Lion. I was able to fix it by enabling fast user switching from Accounts in System Preferences, using the menu bar item to jump back to the login screen while the account was still logged in and then logging back into the account. It worked normally after that and hasn't broken again.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2012 22:42

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

For those of you in the enterprise world trying to get Macs to play nicely with Windows file servers (especially DFS shares on Active Directory), I've been playing with the dev build of 10.8.1 at work and whatever they've done has made it super fast to connect again like it was in earlier versions of Snow Leopard.

Pathing through folders inside network mounts is pretty much instant now and DFS targets resolve pretty much straight away. If you're using the FQDN of your server to connect it'll mount in under a second but if you're relying on DNS suffixes it takes a little longer.

The only thing it still doesn't do properly is set the AD search paths in Directory Utility but that's really a minor annoyance since you can manually do it through a script when you bind to AD.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2012 22:47

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

unruly posted:

I've not been able to get DFS paths to work on 10.7 -- do I need to be Domain joined to access them? Even with FQDN, it doesn't seem to work. (I'm a web guy, so I'm not sure how DFS works, specifically)

It depends to some degree how your DFS is set up but in general all you need is the correct DNS settings.

It's possible that the guys who set up your DFS did what our storage guys did and set it up so the targets pointed to \\server\share instead of \\server.ad.university.edu.au\share. This works fine if your network adapter is set up with the correct DNS suffix because it'll do the work for you but if you're not using the same suffix (and if you're not bound to the domain you're probably not) then you might be able to resolve the root share with the targets in it but you won't get any further than that.

For example, if I go to smb://server.ad.university.edu.au/share, I'll get a list of all the targets that my account (which you'll have to specify if you're not on the domain and you might need to use DOMAIN\Username for the username) has permission to see (we use access based enumeration for that) but if I try to actually open any of the targets it'll just spin for 10 seconds and then display a folder with 0 items in it.

However, if I then go and modify my network adapter to have the ad.university.edu.au suffix and reconnect to smb://server/share or smb://server.ad.university.edu.au/share, it'll path through correctly and the targets I can see will resolve to real folders and get mounted as separate shares in /Volumes.

edit: I should mention that I was able to get this working in 10.7.0.

Mercurius fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Aug 18, 2012

# ¿ Aug 18, 2012 03:13

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Xabi posted:

I have trouble connecting to the eduroam network at work. My Mac tells my that I'm connected and the wifi icon shows connection, but I still have no Internet connection in my browser (or in Terminal). The IT crowd tell me that I just have to connect and enter my u/p, no need for a certificate etc. But still no connection. What gives? Btw, I have ML.

I assume you're just picking it from the wireless menu and the entering username@institution.edu (which will be specific to the Uni/College you belong to) for the username and then whatever your normal password for your institution is?

If it connects properly, it should actually bring up the certificate used for you to choose to add it to your keychain. If it's not doing that it's probably failing at the authentication stage, which you can check by going to Network in System Preferences and seeing if the 802.1X part of your Wi-Fi adapter says it's authenticated. If it's authenticated but you still don't have network access it might not be talking to the DHCP server properly, at which point you'll need to harass your network guys again.

I can post some screenshots of what mine looks like when I get to work if you want.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2012 21:44

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

Levitate posted:

Eh for $99 I'll just wait and see what happens instead...blowing the whole thing up and re-installing is easier than blowing that money for me

My rMBP was doing something similar (reporting it had 50GB free when it should've had closer to 150GB) and I was able to fix it by running repair disk in Disk Utility from the recovery partition.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2012 21:26

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

jackpot posted:

Mother fucker. That's twice now, tonight, that I've hit some drat keyboard shortcut that's changed the size of my desktop icons. First time they went to 64px, the last time they went to 128px. What am I doing that's causing this? It wrecks all my poo poo because when I change them back they never go back to where they were.

Edit: haha jesus, I just looked back at my post history, and this is the third time I've posted in this thread about my desktop icons changing. I guess you can just ignore me, unless anyone's got some new information; until then it's back to the old standby: "Finder is a piece of poo poo."

Quick googling suggests that if you've got Finder windows or the desktop in icon view mode then using the pinch to zoom trackpad gesture will cause the icons to get smaller or larger. Maybe that's it?

# ¿ Dec 5, 2012 06:20

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 15:02

Mercurius: May 4, 2004; Amp it up.

io_burn posted:

Is there a site specific browser out there that doesn't suck a massively fat dick? Fluid is (apparently) not maintained anymore and suffers from some .htaccess authentication bug that makes it completely broken for what I want to use it for. I tried some Google Chrome hack to spawn a new instance of the application as a SSB but Chrome has some horrific OSX bug that causes it to engage the discrete GPU which puts my MacBook Pro into hovercraft mode.

Any ideas?

Are you going to need flash in chrome? From what I remember it's the built in flash plugin in chrome that causes the MBP to flip over to the discrete GPU and drive the fan speed up so maybe if you disable the flash plugin it'll stop doing it.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2012 21:12

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