Mike Ryan

Full filesystem in Finder/Time Machine

The Mac OS X Finder by default only shows stuff regular people need to see - it doesn't show the entire filesystem. Time Machine follows Finder - which means that, although Time Machine backs up everything, you can't see and restore... oh, let's say /usr/local/pgsql/data. To make the entire filesystem visible under Macintosh HD, you need to go to the shell and say

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllFiles YES

Then, of course, reboot.

Developing on my MacBook, with the MAMP stack installed, attempts by any of my local Drupal sites to send email out to a Drupal user (say, a new account notification) go into the local mail queue and get stuck there. /var/log/mail.log shows  "Operation timed out" errors from Postfix, whether sending to an account on my webhost or my Gmail account. telnet to port 25 (using a couple different hosts) also fails with "Operation timed out".

I needed to establish backups. I have a 300GB external hard drive - but it was formatted with NTFS (thus unwritable by Mac OS X), and it contained many, many GB of music files. I had already imported the MP3s into iTunes on my MacBook, but Sarah has been using the external drive to sync her MP3 player through her Windows laptop (using MediaMonkey, a much better music library manager than iTunes, but which unfortunately won't sync to my iPhone).

So, I've installed MAMP on my MacBook, quite a bit simpler than installing and configuring Apache/MySQL/PHP individually...

My question is - does MAMP PRO provide anything worthwhile to me (i.e., anything I can't accomplish via httpd.conf/php.ini/mysql command line...)?

Having some file permission trouble on my MacBook - files that I cannot edit/mv/etc. although I own them and permissions are 755... So, how about good ol' su?

How to Enable the "root" account on Mac OS X

The Quick CLI Method (sudo passwd root) worked fine for allowing me to su - but the root account can't seem to do anything to these files either...

I'm transitioning from Windows to Mac OS X - as I learn how to best make use of the new environment, I'll drop hints & tips here.

Seems a little quiet around here... I got a MacBook this week, the past few days I've been migrating stuff from my old Windows system. It's coming along slowly, had a couple little glitches (the first sync with my iPhone wiped out my contacts and calendar, and then I had problems with Quicken Mac 2007). I'll be more verbose once my platform is stable...