russds.com » Technology

Mac OS X command to log out

russds — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:23:44 +0000

Every once in a while, not a whole lot, but more than mac finantics are willing to admit: My mac goes wack, and for whatever reason my only hope is to either log out, or force the machine down (hold down power button for 10 seconds). Well, as I enjoy a long uptime just as much as the next guy, I would much prefer to log out rather than shut down. If my mac is really not responding, here’s what sometimes will work:

1. SSH into the mac from another machine. Use a tool like putty to login to your mac from another machine.

2. Get the PID of the “loginwindow” command.

ps -Ajc | grep loginwindow

3. Kill the loginwinow PID. The first column of the output line of the above command will be the PID, you want to kill the process.

sudo kill PID

For example:

russds:~ russell$ ps -Ajc | grep loginwindow
russell 38 1 38 729f750 0 Ss ?? 0:24.37 loginwindow

Then logout with:

russds:~ russell$ sudo kill 38

Wondering what a brand new macbook’s battery life is?

russds — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:42:43 +0000

I just got a brand new macbook. The White unibody kind. It’s actually for my wife. Here’s a screen shot of the brand new battery to use as a reference point. Notice the cycle count and full charge capacity.

OS X Wireless Problems? Reset it all.

russds — Fri, 28 May 2010 17:22:08 +0000

Wireless connection problem. Extremely slow wireless connectivity at home and work. Called apple care, they had me delete files:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist,
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist,
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.network.identification.plist,
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist

And restart.

You’ll have to re-add the wireless network settings you once had, but this should fix the problem.

Using Time Machine With A Network Drive

russds — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:39:18 +0000

I wanted to use a network share for my time machine backup. I setup a samba share, and thought I would be good to go until I got a message “the backup disk image … could not be created (error 45)”. So I went to google and did some research. The first site said to create an AFP share on your file server (in my case Debian). That looked like too much work, so I went to the next option, which was much simpler. Create a local image file, copy that to your Samba share, and then fire up Time Machine. This worked great.

1. hdiutil create -size 200g -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -layout SPUD -volname “Backup of $MACHINENAME” $MACHINENAME_$ETHERNETID.sparsebundle

Get the machine name from Preferences -> Sharing.
Get the Ethernet ID (aka mac address, aka physical address) from Preferences -> Network -> Ethernet -> Advanced -> Ethernet

2. cp -r file-you-just-created /Volumes/BackupLocation

3. defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then fire up Time machine select your network drive as the source drive, and you’re good to go. Works like a charm.

Good Robocopy Command Options

russds — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:51:07 +0000

Want to copy *everything* from one drive to another, or make a complete backup of your stuff. Well, forget about using the age old drag and drop method, one might think using the cp would be sufficient, but again: no. The ultimate solution is robocopy.

Robocopy is a simple tool you can download from microsoft. At first glance it looks like something only for Windows Server 2003, but it works on XP just fine. Download the file there, and install it. Then fire up cmd, and type:

robocopy /?

You’ll see there are tons of options, more than I care to even think about. Here’s the only stuff that’s useful to me:

robocopy source destination /E /COPYALL /R:5

/E says to copy everything, going into subdirectories

/COPYALL says to copy everything, created date, last modified, etc.

/R:5 says to only try 5 times to copy something, if those don’t pan out, skip it and go to the next one. (You’ll get a full report of the copy at the end, so you’ll be able to see which ones were missed.) /R:5 is handy incase it finds a file that it doesn’t have access to. You don’t want it to keep trying and trying (the default is 1 million times), most likely you want it to try a couple times, and move on.