The following error message was repeated several times in Console on my aging G4 iMac running Leopard 10.5.8:

7/8/11 9:31:22 PM com.apple.AppleFileServer[8123] MDSChannelPeerCreate: (os/kern) invalid argument

This error appears to be related to permissions of “.feseventsd” located on the root directory of your boot drive. To fix it, quit file sharing by unselecting it in the “Sharing” preference pane, fire up “Terminal.app”, and enter the following at the prompt:

www-schwie-com:/ brad$ sudo chown -R root:staff .fseventsd
Password:
www-schwie-com:/ brad$ sudo chmod -R 770 .fseventsd

After these changes are made to the .fseventsd file, go back to System Preferences and turn file sharing back on under “Sharing”.

My Mac runs 10.6.6 and has a machine account on the Active Directory at work. Today at work, I was in System Preferences->Accounts->Login Options and, by complete accident, I unchecked “Allow network users to log in at login window”. What ensued was a waste of time, so I hope this saves you time, should the same happen to you (I posted a bug report with Apple today and I hope it is resolved in 10.6.7 or Lion).

After unchecking the box, the spinning beachball of death immediately came up and I was forced to restart my unresponsive MacBook Pro. When it came back up, I couldn’t log in to any of the accounts on the MBP, admin or not, network or local, even the root account. I freaked out and tried to reset my passwords by booting the Snow Leopard DVD and then I reinstalled Snow Leopard, but none of this helped!

Eventually, I happened across Brian Keefer’s solution.

To summarize his post, fix things by booting your Mac to the Login Window and in the username field, enter “>Console” without the quotes and press enter. Your screen will go dark for a few moments and then you’ll be prompted for your username and password. Enter credentials that use to work and you should be able to successfully authenticate. Now fix the problem, by using the line below with your own username and password substituted:

dseditgroup -o edit -a localaccounts -u yourusername -P yourpassword -T group com.apple.access_loginwindow

Repeat the command above for any other user accounts that you are not able to log in with. Now type in “reboot” and you should be able to log in as you use to.

When I wish to start over with a fresh install of WinXP that I keep around (whenever Windows XP gets fouled up and I want to start over), I create a new profile and import a stock .vdi I keep around. When I attempt to add the stock .vdi to the profile, Virtualbox freaks out with a UUID error saying it “failed to open a session for the virtual machine” and “UUID does not match value”. Get around this by going to File->Virtual Media Manager…, delete the .vdi from the list, add it back in, and then go in to the Machine profile and re-specify the .vdi.

For too long, Time Machine hasn’t been working on my Mac Pro running Mac OS X Server 10.5. Whenever I tried to enable it, a dialog with “Preparing…” would come up, but the backups would never execute. I believe this occurred after I did a restore one time. Anyway, Time Machine backups are now working again after I performed the following in numerical order:

1) Turn Time Machine off (by opening Time Machine’s Preferences…)
2) Trash the com.apple.TimeMachine.plist in /Library/Preferences
3) Restart your Mac
4) Full Spotlight reindex of the Macintosh HD (do this by dragging your hard drive into the privacy window of Spotlight’s preferences or by executing the shell command “sudo mdutil -E /”.
5) Added a bunch of folders to the “Do Not Backup” list in Time Machine
6) Turn Time Machine on

I was trying to add some information to the footer of an expense report that contained many receipts. The information was placed in the footer as a watermark using “pdftextstamp” on Snow Leopard. For simplicity, I placed the “pdftextstamp” executable in the same folder as the .pdf on my Mac, running Snow Leopard and then executed the following command in Terminal.app from the aforementioned directory location:

./pdftextstamp -iIMG_0002.pdf -oreceipts.pdf -f/Users/brad.schwie/Desktop/receipts -font Arial,Bold -size60 -prefix "Receipt#" -sep " of " -colorFF0000 -pos780,10


This just places some information at the bottom of each page, but it happens to be rather useful if one receipt is placed on each page… Also, this sadly places the word “*TRIAL*” after each footnote that I insert, but for my usage, it doesn’t matter…

I learned about ImageMagick afterward. I’ll try that next time I have a use for inserting page numbers and post my results here.

My Comcast business modem had dropped all 4 channels and I didn’t have physical access to the device (it was behind a closed/locked door). Never fear, I fired up Safari, pointed it to 10.1.10.1 and punched in the following credentials:

mso
D0nt4g3tme

I then went to the Administrative tools section which includes the ability to restart the modem. It worked!

**************UPDATE***************
I restarted the modem at work recently and as I watched the modem’s logs, I saw Comcast download a new config file to the modem that effectively wiped the authentication credentials published above. When I find new ones, I’ll update this blog.
*************************************

I needed to connect to the console of a WinXP machine in the office from my trusty Mac running Snow Leopard and Remote Desktop Connection 2.0 (RDC).

Fired up RDC, entered the name of the machine on the LAN I want to connect to, held down the command (Apple key), and clicked connect.

I love taking my kids for rides on their Adams’ tandem tag along behind my Big Dummy. I bought the tag along used on Craigslist almost 3 years ago. I haven’t replaced any components on it, aside from adding a couple bells to the handlebars that they lovingly ring as we cruise along. I was concerned about the rear tire potentially blowing out (being old/never replaced) and starting to crack, so I replaced the tire with a Primo Kevlar Comet up at Calhoun Cycle. This tire has a built-in reflector on the sidewalls, so when we’re heading back in the evening from fireworks or something, it should be a little safer.

After installed the new tube and tire, I inflated the new tire and I noticed that it could handle up to 100 psi, whereas the OEM tire could only handle 45 psi. I searched the rim for markings on what it is rated for, but found nothing, so I went to the web. The silver rim that is stock on this trail a bike is a KinLin (or Kin Lin) 20-inch x 1.5-inch 36 Hole 406 ISO. I couldn’t find much on the web about this wheel, so I talked to bikeusa on eBay who was selling a similar rim. Bikeusa believes this rim can handle anywhere from 30-95 psi. Right now, I have it pumped to 70 psi and everything seems fine. I’ll try taking it a little higher and report back later. I’ll attach some pics of the new tire some other time, but here are a couple pics of the Big Dummy reincarnated as the Tow Truck.

I had a brief scare today. I accidentally deleted the database for an equipment website I manage in our office (bumblebeedb). The database is running on a Mac OS X Server (10.5.8) machine that is curiously no longer completing Time Machine backups (argh). My last backup for the deleted database occurred back in 2008! Luckily, Apple has enabled mysqlbinlog on OS X Server, so all the changes that were made to “bumblebeedb”, since the last backup in 2008, were found in the following directory:

/private/var/mysql/

In this directory, there should be several file names like “mysql-bin.000040” (sequentially increasing) that contain changes you’ve made to your MySQL databases over time.

To get all the data for my equipment website back up, I fired up “Sequel Pro.app”, imported my backup from 2008 (a .sql file), fired up Terminal, and entered:

mac022374:bschwie$ cd /private/var/mysql
mac022374:mysql bschwie$ mysqlbinlog mysql-bin.000050 mysql-bin.000051 mysql-bin.000052 mysql-bin.000053 mysql-bin.000054 mysql-bin.000055 mysql-bin.000056 mysql-bin.000057 mysql-bin.000058 mysql-bin.000059 mysql-bin.000060 mysql-bin.000061 mysql-bin.000062 mysql-bin.000063 mysql-bin.000064 mysql-bin.000065 mysql-bin.000066 mysql-bin.000067 mysql-bin.000068 mysql-bin.000069 mysql-bin.000070 mysql-bin.000071 mysql-bin.000072 mysql-bin.000073 mysql-bin.000074 mysql-bin.000075 mysql-bin.000076 mysql-bin.000077 mysql-bin.000078 mysql-bin.000079 mysql-bin.000080 mysql-bin.000081 mysql-bin.000082 mysql-bin.000083 mysql-bin.000084 mysql-bin.000085 mysql-bin.000086 mysql-bin.000087 mysql-bin.000088 mysql-bin.000089 mysql-bin.000090 mysql-bin.000091 mysql-bin.000092 mysql-bin.000093 mysql-bin.000094 mysql-bin.000095 mysql-bin.000096 mysql-bin.000097 mysql-bin.000098 mysql-bin.000099 mysql-bin.000100 mysql-bin.000101 mysql-bin.000102 mysql-bin.000103 mysql-bin.000104 mysql-bin.000105 mysql-bin.000106 mysql-bin.000107 mysql-bin.000108 mysql-bin.000109 mysql-bin.000110 mysql-bin.000111 mysql-bin.000112 mysql-bin.000113 mysql-bin.000114 mysql-bin.000115 mysql-bin.000116 mysql-bin.000117 mysql-bin.000118 mysql-bin.000119 mysql-bin.000120 mysql-bin.000121 mysql-bin.000122 mysql-bin.000123 mysql-bin.000124 mysql-bin.000125 | mysql -u root -p

where, the file names ending in .000050 through .000125 contained all the changes I needed to update my 2008 backup to the present (mid-2010).

SUCCESS!

I need to automate a script to back up the mysql database in the future. The rescue effort shouldn’t have come down to this… MySQL has published additional information that may be helpful for your own recovery attempt. Additionally, they have another reference for recovering from crashes.

Had a problem with VirtualBox not launching. I fired up Console to view the console messages and found the following error message:

Cannot trust the directory “/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS”.

Turned out to be a permissions issue with the root user owning a directory. I fired up Terminal.app, ran the following commands, and all was good:

sudo chmod 755 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS
sudo chmod 755 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/components