Kextual Healing: How can I remove Kexts that appear on startup - macos

On my Mac I have a load of Kexts appearing that read like this (there are 14 or so):
The system extension "/System/Library/Extensions/BJUSBLoad.kext" was installed improperly and cannot be used...
Now they didn't start appearing after I consciously did anything, and I've read various threads about it elsewhere. I wonder if there is a programming solution here (using Terminal, perhaps) - something that will suppress the kexts? They mostly seem to relate to hp printer drivers, that sort of thing. Stuff I never use.
None of them seem to relate to things in my Login Items in System Preferences.
Thanks
Tardy

You're off topic on Stack Overflow (this is only about software development), but I'll answer anyway, in the hope that a moderator can move the question to apple.stackexchange.com.
You don't specify which OS X version you're running. Since 10.10 Yosemite, third party kexts shouldn't be installed to /System/Library/Extensions/ but /Library/Extensions/ and need to be codesigned.
If you're really sure you don't need the kexts (or you know how to get them back) you can just delete them.
If you want to find out why they're considererd "installed improperly" you can instead run kextutil -n on them:
kextutil -n /System/Library/Extensions/BJUSBLoad.kext
This should tell you whether the problem is signing, permissions or something else.

Related

OSXFUSE - what exactly does the "local" mount option mean?

I've implemented an OSXFUSE-based file system. It works fine on 10.8, but on Mavericks MS Word opens existing documents as blank (although I am, apparently, returning the correct data - I see the contents in the preview icon. Also, if I copy a file to a real hard drive and open it, it opens fine).
This issue is fixed on Mavericks if I mount my filesystem with the "local" flag. However, using this flag introduces other problems - e.g., it looks like it causes Finder to do some more aggressive caching, hence some file are not visible in Finder (although I can ls them in terminal).
Ideally I want to be able to mount the filesystem without this local flag (my implementation stores file on the network, so passing this flag looks wrong), but the problem with blank Word documents really puzzles me.
We have been able to track down the problem to - wait for it - Google Chrome. When Google Chrome is running while the volume is mounted, the problem appears. If Google Chrome is not running, Word/Excel/etc. files open just fine.
We've been in contact with Benjamin (OSXFUSE developer). Please also see his answer regarding this issue on the OSXFUSE mailing list:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/osxfuse-group/URlw-n-Qakg/bLw2fHHDe7sJ
So far I have not found any bugs in osxfuse that might explain this behavior. The odd thing is that the files are not corrupted or empty. After copying the files to another volume they open just fine. Using LibreOffice to open the file on the FUSE volume works, too.
Chrome and Office seem to be based on the Carbon framework (which is deprecated since Mountain Lion). I believe the issue is somehow related to Carbon since non-Carbon apps do not seem to be affected. Every time a volume is mounted Chrome queries the volume’s capabilities and attributes (and maybe more). As far as I can tell all these file system operations return successful without any errors. But from this point on Office will fail to open documents.
In my opinion the two most likely reasons for this are:
osxfuse might break the VFS file system contract on Mavericks. I’ve been looking into this for some time now but I have not found any clues supporting this.
There might be a bug in the Carbon/CarbonCore framework. The odd thing is that there are no issues when using the stock network file systems afp or smb.
The two possible "fixes" (or rather "workarounds") for this issue seem to be (for now):
Use the "local" mount option (which might introduce other problems and is generally not recommend to use)
Do not use the "volname" mount option. The problem seems only to occur when the "volname" mount option is used. If no custom volume name is set, the problem seems not to occur and Excel/Word/etc. files open just fine - regardless whether Google Chrome was running at mount time.
I've seen the same and likewise local is not an option. Similar problems with Photoshop.
Some findings from my implementation
The problem doesn't occur on first run after reboots.
The problem begins occurring after program exit.
I solved this problem by manually dismounting (and waiting a few seconds) before exiting my program. If unmount is successful, on next run the mount again performs fine.
If the program ever terminates or dismounting fails (file in use, etc) then the volume's read-access is borked in Word/Photoshop on next mount.
Rebooting resolves issue.
Does this match what you're seeing?

In OSX Mountain Lion, what is the planned replacement for portmap?

(I'd be very sorry to hear this is a stupid question, but I've done already some considerable googling and can't make a sense out of it.)
If I try to develop some software that uses RPC, I do not only find out that the RPC Portmapper is not yet running on my system, but also I can't find nor start it. While I could not find any trace about this, this is a clear sign for me that Apple decided to either withdraw support for the good only ONC RPC, or they switched to something else, that I cannot find tho.
https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~pxk/rutgers/notes/rpc/step3.html (they don't seem to be all that outdated) still notes that is just has to be done with launchctl start com.apple.portmap but that one clearly does not exist for me anymore: launchctl start error: No such process
I can only confirm that portmap is not available with 10.8 (Mountain Lion) anymore while I could verify it is still existing on 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I don't know what's the state in 10.7 (Lion).
(It's amazing how at the beginning I thought of Stackoverflow as a very clever thing, yet, everytime I ask a question, it starts with apologies and me admitting my stupidity)
turns out my question was at least half stupid. I still can't find any documentation on this, but launchctl start rpcbind seems to float my boat. And that is the more BSD variant of doing it.
Let's hope this is at least helpful to somebody else in some documentation way. And thanks for being my teddy bear.
FWIW on the page you linked to, where it lists the command for OS X as launchctl start com.apple.portmap it also lists the command for BSD as /usr/sbin/rpcbind, which is there in Mtn Lion and would probably explain why launchctl start rpcbind works.

Change MAC-Address in iOS5

I Used to change my Mac Adress in Open Networks with the command:
ifconfig eth0 ether 00:11:22:33:44:55
in iOS4 this was no Problem, i remember there was even an App on Cydia for that. For ifconfig i instaklled network-tools from BigBoss Source.
Since iOS5 the Command is going thru Terminal without any error, however the MAC-Address isnt changing anymore... Someone a Idea on how to change it?
It's possible. For some reason, spoofing it in iOS 5 won't work (either via command line or MacX4), but you could always rewrite it in hardware. There are several cons to this and this is not worth during unless you absolutely have to: it will break your music player (so you have to use VLC or the like), is permanent even after reboot, and effectively changes your UDID (so betas will not work and the device will be unregistered).
nvram wifiaddr="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX"
Again, the cons definitely outweigh the pros here. I'm sure eventually someone will come up with the software to do a spoof, not a total rewrite.
It can be done. My iPad running 5.01 has an arbitrary MAC. There are no restrictions as far as playing music, and I am still able to access Apple services (at least those that I use personally) without hindrance. It's a moderately tedious process, but after a bunch of failed attempts I was able to successfully (and permanently unless I decide to repeat the process using my originals) change the values with a combination of terminal commands, DFU/recovery cycles, OSX apps, and a clean restore via iTunes. If anyone is still interested, I would be willing to outline the process. I would do so now, but I have to hash out some specifics concerning the iTunes host file.
Because the MAC address is unchangeable for a reason?

How to delete an unfinished Darwinbuild build

I got darwinbuild off macports to get a single unix executable (long story, see Where/how to get the Mac OSX "login" command). I was having trouble figuring out how it worked, so I tried their website's example build, "darwinbuild xnu"
It worked, and when I opened the new volume it mounted in finder, it appeared to be building a whole new mac osx (I know this is probably not the case, but that is what it looked like to me at least.) So I grabbed the binary I wanted, hit control-c in terminal, and unmounted the volume. Everything seemed to work out, but even after restarting the computer, I could not get the 2gig or so that build/mount/kernal/thing took up.
I even tried restoring a timemachine backup, but even that would not bring the free space back.
So how do I get rid of this thing once and for all?
If you know the location the files were written to, navigate there in Finder then delete them. If you don't, read the documentation that comes with the Darwin stuff you downloaded (it'll be there, believe me) to find out or download a drive space analyzer app to locate it.
Really, I don't see how these questions are about programming? They're more "how do I fix something I screwed up ancillary to programming-related efforts," which are of course superuser.com material.

What is a "Symbolication warning"?

I've got a user reporting crashes in my Mac OS X application, and their console logs report the following:
Symbolication warning: error parsing FDE at 0x100052649 in:\n
Does anyone have any insight into what this might be? I assume that somehow the symbols have been stripped from my app in a way that gets in the way of Mac OS X's crash reporter, but I've not seen it before.
I can honestly say that I have never seen this one before. I have seen a number of other dynamic linking problems just not this one. If the user is amenable to helping you with this defect, you might want to write a shell script to enable some dynamic linking environment variables and then launch your application.
#! /bin/bash
export DYLD_PRINT_LIBRARIES=1
export DYLD_PRINT_LIBRARIES_POST_LAUNCH=1
export DYLD_PRINT_APIS=1
export DYLD_PRINT_BINDINGS=1
export DYLD_PRINT_DOFS=1
open -a Console.app > /tmp/link-log 2>&1
The output log might provide some hint as to what is going on. You could also capture the output of otool and other command line utilities to check for unexpected libraries and what not.
You might want to google Symbolication to get a better handle of what is going on here. I came across an interesting chunk of code from Darwin that points this to a dynamic symbol lookup warning. There is also a utility called Shark that may be of interest as well.
Good luck...
I just found this topic via Google because I'm having the same problem. The StarCraft installer crashes immediately. It points to /usr/libexec/oah/translate, which seems to work perfectly well. My guess is this has something to do with the fact the computer it doesn't work on runs iDeneb 1.3 (aka Mac OS X 86 for use on non-Apple hardware), whereas the computer that can run the application just fine has a genuine version of Leopard.

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