Notes on Mac OS (X)

Collection of notes on Apple's OS.

SSH

In the past few years (only updated to 10.15 recently) a number of OS updates have changes some of the behaviour of ssh. Since Mac OS Sierra, ``ssh-agent`` does not automatically store the password in the MacOS keychain anymore.

This Reddit shows ho to fix it by adding the following lines to your ``.ssh/config`` file:

Host *
   UseKeychain yes
   AddKeysToAgent yes
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_25519
  • Command line search: find [path] -iname “some*.stuff”

Useful software

Applications which I deem essential when working on Mac OS X:

Updating/Sys Admin

Updating a MacMini (2010, server)

When trying to update my MacMini mid-2010 version (Server) from Yosemite (10.10.5) to High Sierra (most recent version which runs on that hardware) the Installer reported that it was “Unable to unmount volume for repair” and rebooted into the old version.

I had replaced the original disks with a 500 GB SSD from OWC and apparently there are issues with the High Sierra installer (by default the file system will be converted to AFPS from HFS+). There seem to be a few people running into the same issue.

Some user on the Apple Stackexchange reported a relatively lengthy routine to circumvent the issue for an iMac with Fusion Drive. On the Apple Support pages, a much shorter version was posted which amounts to issuing the following commands as sudo on the drive where the installer is run:

sudo mv /.quota.ops.user /.quota.ops.user.orig 
sudo mv /.quota.user /.quota.user.orig

(have changed/fixed? the filenames from the original post)

After these files were moved out of the way, the installer seems to be running fine.