Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/14
After years of use, the cooling fans of my 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro 2015 model got quite a bit dirty, causing them to run louder and louder.
The video below the fold shows how to clean them: 11 screws, some isopropyl alcohol, (dry!) compressed, and caution for the connector-clips connecting the bottom plate.
It helps having a:
- pentalobe P5 screwdriver
- plastic spudger so separate the bottom plate (especially be careful with the connector-clips)
- magnet to stick the screws to, as they are really tiny and it is easy to loose them
I got the pentalobe screwdriver with some spare screws from the German Amazon: [Archive.is] Kricson Ersatzschrauben MacBook Pro – 4 Pack Gummi: Amazon.de: Computer & Zubehör
You can get a similar one from the USA Amazon site: [Archive.is] Amazon.com: 8 Pack Rubber Case Feet + Set of 20pcs Repair Replacement Screw + 1pcs 5 Point Pentalobe Screwdriver for Unibody MacBook Pro Retina A1425 A1502 A1398 13″ 15″ Bottom Case(Retina): Computers & Accessories
Two important tips:
- After using isopropyl alcohol, let the parts dry
- Hold the fans when spraying compressed air (to prevent the fan-motors to create over-voltage, and to prevent the fans spinning faster than they are rated for)
The iFixit pictures for replacing the SSD help greatly to see how to remove and re-attach the back-cover, and where the various parts are inside the machines.
Note the screws differ between the 13-inch and 15-inch models!
–jeroen
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Posted in Apple, Mac, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/11
Note just because of a Mac being incompatible, but also because of 32-bit apps being incompatible ruling out Cataline (10.15) or newer.
[Wayback] How to get old versions of macOS – Apple Support
If your Mac isn’t compadmgtible with the latest macOS, you might still be able to upgrade to an earlier macOS, such as macOS Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, or El Capitan.
…
Download macOS
It takes time to download and install macOS, so make sure that you’re plugged into AC power and have a reliable internet connection.
Safari uses these links to find the old installers in the App Store. After downloading from the App Store, the installer opens automatically.
- macOS Catalina 10.15 can upgrade Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks
- macOS Mojave 10.14 can upgrade High Sierra, Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion
- macOS High Sierra 10.13 can upgrade Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion
Safari downloads the following older installers as a disk image named InstallOS.dmg or InstallMacOSX.dmg. Open the disk image, then open the .pkg installer inside the disk image. It installs an app named Install [Version Name]. Open that app from your Applications folder to begin installing the operating system.
- [Wayback] macOS Sierra 10.12 (InstallOS.dmg) can upgrade El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, or Lion
- [Wayback] OS X El Capitan 10.11 (InstallMacOSX.dmg) can upgrade Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion, or Snow Leopard
- [Wayback] OS X Yosemite 10.10 (InstallMacOSX.dmg) can upgrade Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion, or Snow Leopard
links for 10.13 and newer on the Apple site are App-Store only, so you need to download, then save the installer in a safe place.
Alternative download methods and notes on certificate expirations:
–jeroen
Posted in Apple, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, macOS 10.12 Sierra, macOS 10.13 High Sierra, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/24
IoT devices still often use the ‘Basic’ HTTP Authentication Scheme for authorisation, see [Wayback] RFC7617: The ‘Basic’ HTTP Authentication Scheme (RFC ) and [Wayback] RFC2617: HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication (RFC ).
Often this authentication is used even over http instead of over https, for instance the Egardia/Woonveilig alarm devices I wrote about yesterday at Egardia/Woonveilig: some notes about logging on a local gateway to see more detailed information on the security system. This is contrary to guidance in:
- RFC7617:
This scheme is not considered to be a secure method of user
authentication unless used in conjunction with some external secure
system such as TLS (Transport Layer Security, [RFC5246]), as the
user-id and password are passed over the network as cleartext.
- RFC2617:
"HTTP/1.0", includes the specification for a Basic Access
Authentication scheme. This scheme is not considered to be a secure
method of user authentication (unless used in conjunction with some
external secure system such as SSL [5]), as the user name and
password are passed over the network as cleartext.
Fiddling with those alarm devices, I wrote these two little bash functions (with a few notes) that work both on MacOS and in Linux:
# `base64 --decode` is platform neutral (as MacOS uses `-D` and Linux uses `-d`)
# `$1` is the encoded username:password
function decode_http_Basic_Authorization(){
echo $1 | base64 --decode
echo
}
# `base64` without parameters encodes
# `echo -n` does not output a new-line
# `$1` is the username; `$2` is the password
function encode_http_Basic_Authorization(){
echo $1:$2 | base64
}
The first decodes the <credentials> from a Authorization: Basic <credentials> header into a username:password clean text followed by a newline.
The second one encodes a pair of username and password parameters into such a <credentials> string.
They are based on these initial posts that were not cross platform or explanatory:
- [Wayback] Decode HTTP Basic Access Authentication – Stack Pointer
- [Wayback] Create Authorization Basic Header | MJ’s Web Log
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, Authentication, bash, bash, Communications Development, Development, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, Linux, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Scripting, Security, Software Development, TCP, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/18
I forgot how I had my MacOS Finder lists grouped by age and wanted to turn this off for one Finder window (normally grouping by age is very useful).
It turns out ‘group by’ is actually called ‘arrange by’ and is under the ‘gear’ icon.
Disabling is very easy [Wayback] Can I turn off grouping by date in Finder… – Apple Community
Oh, it might just be the arrange by. Click the gear up at the top and chagne arrange by to NONE. See if that helps.
But there is a catch: besides the current window, it also affects any new windows you open (existing other open windows are not affected by the change unless you restart Finder).
–jeroen
Posted in Apple, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/17
I wrote about Creating a bootable USB installer for ESXi and use it to create a bootable ESXi installation.
Just in case I ever need to do this on a non-Windows system, some links:
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, Apple, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Linux, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/10
I will likely need some of these links in the future:
–jeroen
Posted in Apple, Development, Encoding, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/01/24
Just found out about [Wayback] Lode Runner Web Game:
A HTML5 (CreateJS) remake of Lode Runner
I have played that way too much in my Apple ][ and //e days.
Hopefully I won’t be addicted to it as back in those days.
Just watching the demo mode is soooooo cool!
I remember designing my own lievens, then winning from the local Apple shop (Vlasveld Computers, which also had a country wide Apple magazine). Cool days!
–jeroen
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Posted in //e, 6502, About, Apple, Apple ][, History, Personal, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/01/21
Since dd on Apple does not support progress parameters via [Wayback] macos dd progress – Google Search:
- [Wayback] Quick: dd with progress indication on macOS
A nice way I found to get progress indication whilst still being able to benefit from the huge speed increase in using /dev/rdiskX is to install a tool called pv, also known as [WayBack] Pipe Viewer.
Example:
sudo dd if=/dev/rdiskX bs=1m | pv -s 64G | sudo dd of=/dev/rdiskY bs=1m
Another way to achieve something similar would be to use brew to install coreutils, which will come with a newer version of dd that supports the status option.
Example:
gdd if=/dev/diskX of=/dev/diskY bs=1m status=progress
- [Wayback] el capitan – How can I track progress of dd – Ask Different
You just need to enter a controlT character from the keyboard while the dd command is executing.
By pressing the controlT character, you are sending the same SIGINFO signal to the dd command that the command pkill -INFO -x dd sends.
dd itself doesn’t provide a progress bar. You may estimate the progress of the dd copy process by adding a pkill -INFO command though.
Example:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=64m count=1000 & while pkill -INFO -x dd; do sleep 1; done
- [Wayback] dd progress indicator on OSX
signal siginfo is coupled to key-combination CTRL-T. No need to use kill, you can just type CTRL-T in the terminal window where dd is running.
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, iMac, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/01/18
Almost two years ago, GitHub – facebook/osquery: SQL powered operating system instrumentation, monitoring, and analytics published from the automatic blog queue.
It was in the midst of my rectum cancer treatment, so I was glad the blog queue back then was still about 18 months deep.
This meant I looked into osquery in 2018, which I remember because I needed it on MacOS as I did not want to remember the syntax for MacOS specific commands on getting system information. It also coincides with how much my repository fork was behind: [Wayback: jpluimers/osquery commits/Archive: jpluimers/osquery commits].
Fast forward to now, the breath of systems I’m involved with has widened, so I was glad to see that Kristian Köhntopp mentioned it:
So time to try it again (:
The links he mentioned:
- [Wayback/Archive] Welcome to osquery – osquery
osquery is an operating system instrumentation framework for Windows, OS X (macOS), Linux, and FreeBSD. The tools make low-level operating system analytics and monitoring both performant and intuitive.
- [Wayback/Archive] Welcome to osquery – osquery: High Level Features
The high-performance and low-footprint distributed host monitoring daemon, osqueryd, allows you to schedule queries to be executed across your entire infrastructure. The daemon takes care of aggregating the query results over time and generates logs which indicate state changes in your infrastructure. You can use this to maintain insight into the security, performance, configuration, and state of your entire infrastructure. osqueryd‘s logging can integrate into your internal log aggregation pipeline, regardless of your technology stack, via a robust plugin architecture.
The interactive query console, osqueryi, gives you a SQL interface to try out new queries and explore your operating system. With the power of a complete SQL language and dozens of useful tables built-in, osqueryi is an invaluable tool when performing incident response, diagnosing a systems operations problem, troubleshooting a performance issue, etc.
- [Wayback/Archive] osqueryd (daemon) – osquery
- [Wayback/Archive] osqueryi (shell) – osquery
- [Wayback/Archive] Aggregating Logs – osquery
- [Wayback/Archive] AWS Logging – osquery
Main site: [Wayback/Archive] osquery | Easily ask questions about your Linux, Windows, and macOS infrastructure
Repository: [Wayback/Archive] osquery/osquery: SQL powered operating system instrumentation, monitoring, and analytics.
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, Development, DevOps, Facebook, Infrastructure, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/01/13
This is totally opposite to yesterday’s Secure Boot post: [Wayback/Archive.is] shanyungyang/esxi-unlocker: VMware ESXi macOS
macOS Unlocker V3.0.2 for VMware ESXi
=====================================
1. Introduction
---------------
Unlocker 3 for ESXi is designed for VMware ESXi 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0
The patch code carries out the following modifications dependent on the product
being patched:
* Fix vmware-vmx to allow macOS to boot
* Fix libvmkctl to allow vSphere to control the guest
The code is written in Python as it makes the Unlocker easier to run and
maintain on ESXi.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| IMPORTANT: |
| ========== |
| |
| Always uninstall the previous version of the Unlocker before using a new |
| version. Failure to do this could render VMware unusable. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
2. Installation
---------------
Copy the distribution file to the ESXi host datastore using scp or some other
data transfer system. If you want to use the source version (i.e. from GIT) see
"5. Building" fist.
Decompress the file from the ESXi console or via SSH:
tar xzvf esxi-unlocker-xxx.tgz
(xxx - will be the version number, for example, 300)
Run the command from the terminal:
./esxi-install.sh
Finally reboot the server.
3. Uninstallation
-----------------
Open the ESXi console or login via SSH and change to the folder where the files were extracted.
Run the command from the terminal:
./esxi-uninstall.sh
Finally reboot the server.
4. Notes
--------
A. There is a command added called esxi-smctest.sh which can show if the patch is successful. It must be run from a
terminal or SSH session. The output should be:
/bin/vmx
smcPresent = true
custom.vgz false 32486592 B
Note: The uncompressed size reported for custom.vgz will vary depending on the ESXi version.
B. The unlocker can be temporarily disabled during boot by editing the boot options and adding "nounlocker".
5. Building
-----------
If you want to use a version which is not availbale as a distribution (e.g. the code from "master" branch)
you need to first build the package.
Checkout the repository:
git clone https://github.com/shanyungyang/esxi-unlocker.git
(if you don't have git installed you can download ZIP archive from GitHub instead)
Enter the directory and build:
cd esxi-unlocker
./esxi-build.py
If everything went correctly the ouput should be:
ESXi-Build for macOS
Timestamping files...
Creating unlocker.tgz...
etc/
etc/rc.local.d/
etc/rc.local.d/unlocker.py
Creating esxi-unlocker-301.tgz...
unlocker.tgz
esxi-install.sh
esxi-uninstall.sh
esxi-smctest.sh
readme.txt
The package you need to copy in the example above is esxi-unlocker-301.tgz (NOT unlocker.tgz!).
6. Thanks
---------
Thanks to Zenith432 for originally building the C++ unlocker and Mac Son of Knife
(MSoK) for all the testing and support.
Thanks also to Sam B for finding the solution for ESXi 6 and helping me with
debugging expertise. Sam also wrote the code for patching ESXi ELF files and
modified the unlocker code to run on Python 3 in the ESXi 6.5 environment.
History
-------
26/09/18 3.0.0 - First release
01/05/20 3.0.1 - Fix for ESXi 7.0
10/18/20 3.0.1 - Fix for ESXi 7.0 U1 (7.0.1)
(c) 2011-2018 Dave Parsons
–jeroen
Posted in Apple, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 