Cleaning Up Apple TimeMachine Might Take A While

When I bought my Apple iMac about 2.5 years ago, I also added a 500GB external drive for backup reasons. This backup drive is a 2.5" USB-powered Western Digital drive. Small, unobtrusive, and stuck to the back of my iMac.

Now, >2 years later, the TimeMachine process started to complain that I ran out of disk space for (the TimeMachine) backup purposes (4.85MB free of 500GB). I used to think that TimeMachine would warn once, and after that it just started to overwrite old backups, but no matter how many times I clicked OK -> Continue etc. the out of space error kept coming back. Highly annoying. During this period I have no idea if it's actually doing anything in regards to backing up my data. I needed to resolve this, so I had two options;

Get a new / bigger external harddrive (on Christmas eve......)
Or delete the old backups from about a year back to the beginnning.

Since getting a new drive was out of the question I decided to delete some really old stuff on the backup drive. My reasoning being that if I didn't need the extremely old (modified) data back then, there's little chance I need it now or any time soon.

Selecting the data and deleting it was easy, this only 'moved' the data to the Trash. In other words, it's still sitting on that drive. I have the empty the trash to free the actual space on the external drive.

The screenshot was taken while it was still counting the objects that were going to be deleted. Eventually (after 2.5 hours), the counter reached >480,000 items. After this time the actual cleaning of the Trash started. That was over 1 hour ago, and it still needs to eliminate about 350,000 items. This is one of those situations were lightning backup fast drives are welcome. For the other 364 days a year it doesn't really matter.

It's gonna be a long night for the iMac.

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Willem and filed under Software, Annoying, Apple and tagged TimeMachine Cleanup.

OS X Wireless Connection Problems Solved (??)

Ever since the upgrade to Apple OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) on my MacBook (v5.1) I encountered wireless problems every now and then. These 'experiences' are documented in two different blog posts here and here.
At the time I was also running an 'old' version of Little Snitch (v2.x). After installing v3.0.1 my problems seemed to have solved... Seemed, until I upgraded Little Snitch to v3.0.2.

After the (mandatory) reboot my wireless connections were gone. The adapter wouldn't go active. The symptoms being the exactly the same as before. So I have no doubt, that Little Snitch had something to do with it.

Posted on December 8, 2012 by Willem and filed under Software, Annoying, Apple, Operating Systems, Tips'n Tricks and tagged WLAN Little Snitch PCIE OSX.

Timetravel Made Possible With The Samsung Galaxy S2

And yes. Another rant from an Apple fan-boy (I guess).

As you can read here, I have a Samsung Galaxy S2 at home, and the device is still in the original box. I did open the box, just to check the device, and as you may have read; the device went straight back into the box. Since then, it has been out of the box about four times, and not more than an hour. The main reason (for getting it out of the box) is that there a software updates that should fix problems with the device. I guess not the problems I have with the device..... I want to give the device a chance. I really do, but they don't come close to the Apple iOS experience. The Android eco-system has still light years to go.

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Hardware and tagged Android Galaxy S2 Kies Samsung Timetravel.

Backup Failure

Creating backups. Something everyone with a computer should do. Not only to preserve the items of (sentimental) value, but also to minimise the time and effort to recreate what went to the eternal data fields.
But even if you create backups, things can go wrong.

Many believe that storing the data on an external device is a backup. Well, it is, but only if you have the original data on another device. Backup means that you store the same thing (at least) in two places. If one of the devices (your computer with internal hard drive, or the external backup device) should fail, you have still one copy of the data, which you can restore or backup (depending which device went up in smoke).

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Personal, Software and tagged TrueCrypt backup.

MacBook Wireless Borked Again, Still, etc.

A while back I had regular issues with the wireless adapter on my MacBook after I had upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion, but after the removal of Little Snitch (I still ran the beta version) it seemed that times were a changing... Seemed that is.

This morning I was fiddling about with my photo website, and needed to see the results in several different browsers. One of them being Google Chrome.
Trying to launch the Chrome app, it crashed immediately. Reopening didn't help. So I tried to download a newer version, since I hadn't updated mine since the upgrade to Mountain Lion. The result; It still crashed. Even after removing all Chrome (and Google) references on the disk, it still crashed.

So, it became time to consult the book of knowledge, and see what the Internets had to say about my little ordeal.

Posted on October 13, 2012 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Apple, Browsers, Hardware, Tips'n Tricks and tagged Google Chrome Lion Mountain wireless.

Ziggo Internet, Juniper Firewalls and DHCP

At the house I have currently two ISP delivering broadband. Well, broadband isn't the correct word, since the the one of them is only a mere 256kbps (I think). The other is a 'whopping' 20Mbps.
The 20Mb connection is provided by XS4ALL, and the 256kbps is for free (if you have a phone subscription with Ziggo). The 256kbp is the minimum they provide to transport the phone calls, but if you're a masochist you can also browse the internet over that connection.

So, two ISP @ home. Combine that with a Juniper SRX firewall, and a dual ISP setup is born. The theory of that setup is that I connect both ISP's to the firewall, and use the 20Mb line as a default internet connection, but when that one dies, I automatically get switched to the backup line (256kbps).

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Hardware, Internet, Security, Tips'n Tricks and tagged Dual ISP Ziggo dhcp srx Juniper.

Unable To Turn On Wireless In OS X Mountain Lion

Last night I was minding my own business on the couch, when the wireless connection on my MacBook (UniBody) decided to call it a day. According to the symptoms (no bars visible in the WiFi icon in the menu bar, no visible wireless networks in the vicinity), the WiFi adapter was turned off. Turning the WiFi back on was not possible though.

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Apple, Hardware, Tips'n Tricks and tagged Lion Mountain wireless.

Junos Pulse, Apple iOS, and Split-Tunneling

When you create (SSL)VPN access for you employees, you might enable split-tunneling to save corporate bandwidth. No split-tunneling means that all traffic is forwarded into the VPN tunnel. So if you browse the internet with an active VPN, the traffic goes through the VPN, and accesses the Internet through the corporate Internet connection. This isn't a big problem with a couple of employees, but with hundreds on the road or working from home, this might frustrate the employees in the building.

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Apple, Security, Software, Junos and tagged Junos Pulse VPN iOS ssl Juniper.

Mozilla's Firefox Invalid, Yet Valid Certificate

In my line of work I get to work with a lot of security devices which run self-signed certificates. Those certificates are most of the time generated when the device / appliance is installed, or configured for the very first time. When you connect to one of those devices with a web browser, you tend to see the warnings displayed by the browser that the connection is not to be trusted.

In Firefox, you can add an exception in the browser. When you've done that, the next time you go to the website, the browsers treats the website as trusted.

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Browsers, Tips'n Tricks and tagged PKI certificates firefox.

Screen Capture Can't Be Saved

After upgrading my iMac to OS X Lion (10.7) everything works (or at least seems to work), until I tried to do a screen capture with the built-in tools.

Things that worked:

Capturing the entire desktop to file
Capturing a selection (using the cross-hair) to file
Capturing the entire desktop to the clipboard
Capturing a selection (using the cross-hair) to the clipboard

Things that didn't work:

Capturing entire windows to file or the clipboard (SHIFT-COMMAND-4 + SPACE / SHIFT-COMMAND-3 + SPACE)

All I got was a weird notification box with the message:

Screen capture can't be saved

The console application also showed an error message:

12/16/11 1:40:08.762 com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent: screencapture could not capture window 3c

Lurking around the Interwebs, I found this seem to occur after an upgrade of the OS, but real solutions are hard to come by.

This is what I did to solve my problem:

Remove the screencapture PLIST (preferences) file (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.screencapture.plist)
Copy a com.apple.screencapture.plist file from a working OS X Lion environment and place it in the correct location on the troubled OS X installation.

That seemed to result in two com.apple.screencapture.plist files (one with an additional extension of .locked). I removed the .locked file, rebooted the iMac, and screen capture worked again.

I must mention that I didn't see the .locked file initially. Could be that it existed before. In which case I probably did more than was required to get things fixed....

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Apple, Operating Systems, Tips'n Tricks and tagged Screencapture locked save.