UK Mac Wizards

Kernel panic not VMWare

You have a kernel panic and the big clue you are looking for in the report back to Apple (or in the console log) is:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0×001694C6): “vm_map_unwire: entry is unwired”@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.5.20/osfmk/vm/vm_map.c:4110

Trawlled the internet and came up with 2 possibilities:

1. VMWare Fusion. OK, VMWare does some nifty things with memory.
2. Faulty RAM modules

The pointer for me was that booting in ’safe mode’ caused the Mac to start normally and to be happy for days on end; time for my client to copy over onto another Mac. So I think “Aha, some third-party software is lousing up!”. And the fact that one of the most often used is Fusion seems to be too good to be true.

Which it was. The Mac didn’t stop panicing on start-up no matter what bit of software I removed, what cache I cleared, which plist I dumped.

So I reluctantly move on to RAM. I take out a module. No panics. Put it back, take out the other module, no panics again, So I really strain the Mac with big photoshop files and opening every app in the dock. All fine. So I put the RAM back and restart. No Panics. So all I needed to have done was re-fit the RAM. Sometimes the temptation to be too clever is too much.

In this case the RAM looked fine, but must have made poor contact. It has worked fine since. First thing I’ll do next time. Apologies if it doesn’t work for you. Perhaps my internet trawl will be useful to you:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7517857&#7517857

http://macosx.com/forums/hardware-peripherals/302019-help-random-imac-aluminum-20-crashes-boot.html

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=92754

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8418392&#8418392

Wireless Time Machine back up without Time Capsule

This post is mainly to remind me of the procedure to follow, in that a little searching on the web will find the answers. However, when I am in front of a client’s mac I would prefer to have the answers in one place.

1) Enable Time Machine’s latent ability to back-up to other kinds of disk. Copy this into an open Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

and press return.

2) Mount the network disk* that you want to back-up onto. Make sure you can see an open Finder window with its contents.
3) In Time Machine preferences choose this disk as the target for the back-up.
4) As Time Machine tries and fails to create a back-up on this target disk, watch the open Finder window; a disk image file will appear there called something like: “MacName_0016cb8c8882.sparsbundle“. As it does so, select its name and copy it. Paste the name somewhere for later. (The “MacName” will be the name of the Mac, the alphanumeric will be the hardware address of the ethernet card used for networking).
5) Time Machine will eventually complain that the back-up failed. Ah well.
6) Find where you pasted the name of the sparsebundle file Time Machine tried to create. Below it paste this code:

DISK_IMAGE_NAME=”Mac_number.sparsebundle” DISK_SIZE=110000 hdiutil create -library SPUD -megabytes $DISK_SIZE -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname “$DISK_IMAGE_NAME” “$DISK_IMAGE_NAME”

7) Replace Mac_number.sparsebundle with the actual sparsebundle name saved earlier. Retain the ” ” double quotes! Determine whether a disk size of 110000 MB is enough for a back-up disk and adjust the figure accordingly. Copy and paste the revised code into a new Terminal window and press return. This will create a disk image file with the same name as the one that Time Machine failed to create. It will at first be small but grows in size as files are backed-up. Copy this new file to the networked disk.

Time Machine will now be able to back-up. The first back-up will be huge and take days, so in the Time Machine preferences, select lots of folders to omit from the back-up in the Time Machine. Then the first sync will be small. The missed folders can be activated later.

*Network disk: If the disk is being shared from another Mac you may have to fiddle with its permissions until Time Machine will see it. For me, using a firewire disk shared from a Mac running Panther, giving everyone read-write access and un-checking ignore ownership on this volume did the trick:

Credit:
http://adamcohenrose.blogspot.com/2008/02/time-machine-wireless-backup-without.html

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=427488

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080420211034137

New MacBook Pro

The new MacBook Pro (15 inch screen) comes with both integrated graphics and a graphics card for extra graphics performance. I hope this is a really good feature. For ordinary work you can use the integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor so as not to punish your battery too much. Then when you do some heavy duty graphics work you would otherwise do on a desktop machine, you can switch to the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT with up to 512MB of graphics RAM. That sounds really smart. 

However they have not released the 17 inch version of the MacBook Pro yet. I am itching to know whether they will bump up the processing power further. In any case it would be great to have this feature. I own an older one and it was certainly an inspired purchase. For graphics work you need that bigger screen.

In the UK you can get the 15 inch MacBook Pro here:

DABs | Misco | Apple

Personally, I’b buy straight from Apple because I love the ease with which I can configure the purchase, but other vendors may offer better deals with RAM, AppleCare etc. If anyone does get one (I am holding off for the 17 inch version, depending on cash-flow!) please let me know how the graphics switching feature pans out in real life.

iPhone compatible blog

Have just installed a plug-in from bravenewcode.com that makes wordpress blogs appear a little more neatly on the iPhone screen, and allows installation of a custom button for the iPhone home screen that links directly to the blog. It was a quick and easy install.

Thanks to Joshua at Macgasm for the tip.

EasyWriter

You can write emails in landscape format using the wider keyboard with EasyWriter. For a limited time it is free on iTunes so go get!

Anything that makes it easier to write emails is a must.

Beware vmware snaphots

My MacBook Pro has been running out of space for some time and I have put off the inevitable tidy. It was down to its last 20 GB where it always starts to get into trouble. (That seems like a lot to me as I had older macs that didn’t have that in total).

Anyway time to lose some stuff, so I searched (cmd-space) for the usual culprits: .dmg, .ps files for instance but thought there must be a better approach. Hurrah, http://www.omnigroup.com are doing a public beta of omnidisksweeper, so a quick download gets me a scientific approach to finding large files. And so it does; finding that my Applications folder has ballooned to 70GB – big for a 200 GB disk. The real culprit it turns out are files in my vmware folder; 8 GB files ending .vmdk that contain backed up data used by vmware Fusion to snap the system configuration! These must be deleted from Fusion itself once the guest system has suspended. My new consolidated Fusion disk has returned 29GB to me. So I can continue not to be tidy!