Mac OS X

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A personal list of software, configuration and tweaks to make Mac OS X even better.

Configuration

Screen Sharing

The following only applies to Screen Sharing 1.0 (which came with 10.5.0). Unfortunately, apple removed much of this functionality in Screen Sharing 1.1 with the update to 10.5.5. If you saved (or otherwise extracted) Screen Sharing 1.0 from the plain 10.5.0, you could still uses these features. However, Screen Sharing 1.0 crashes on 10.6, so you have to make do with the bundled version 1.1 and it's (lack of) features. TUAW post about this

Screen Sharing is normally hidden in the library folder, so I like to drag it to the Dock for easy access. Use the Finder's Go To command to go to /System/Library/CoreServices and drag Screen Sharing to the Dock, or create an alias to it and put it in Applications.

Also, Screen Sharing has some hidden features that come it quite handy (thanks to this Macworld hint):

Enable a network browser for machines offering Screen Sharing session:

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug 1

Enable a toolbar with additional functions:

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing \
'NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar' -dict-add 'TB Item Identifiers' \
'(Scale,Control,Share,Curtain,Capture,FullScreen,GetClipboard,SendClipboard,Quality)

Time Machine Frequency

Time Machine runs a backup every hour, or 3600 seconds. With the following command, you can change the frequency to have it run more or less often.

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 3600

If you don't feel like changing system defaults, you can also use TimeMachineEditor or TimeMachineScheduler.

Sending System Mail

Some processes on Mac OS X send mail through the built-in mail server, Postfix. In it's default configuration, Postfix will try and deliver such mail to a local user account. Since there's no mail application installed that can read mail from traditional mailboxes (in /var/mail/username), the only result is that you get annoying reminders that you have new mail whenever you open a Terminal window.

To be able to properly handle these mail messages, you can configure Postfix to send them to your mail server, like GMail. To reconfigure Postfix, do this:

  1. Find out which server name, username and password you have to use to send mail through your email provider.
  2. Create a text file with the server name, username and password under /etc/postfix/relay_password
  3. Convert the relay_password file to a postfix database using postmap.
  4. Amend the Postfix configuration by adding appropriate entries to the /etc/postfix/main.cfg config file.

To create the relay_password file, you can use this command line:

$ sudo sh -c 'echo servername username:password >/etc/postfix/relay_password'

To convert the file to a database, run this command:

$ sudo postmap /etc/postfix/relay_password

Add these lines to /etc/postfix/main.cfg, for example at the end of the file:

relayhost = [servername]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/relay_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_use_tls = yes

To test whether things are working, send yourself an email from the command line:

$ mail -s "test" me@example.com
This is the body of the test mail.
Enter a single period on a line by itself, or hit Ctrl-D to finish entering the message.

If you get an error message, or if the mail does not arrive within a couple of minutes, check /var/log/mail.log for further hints.

Potential issues are:

  • if your mail server does not support the use of TLS (encryption), remove the smtp_use_tls = yes;
  • if your mail server does not listen on the mail submission port (587), try with port 25.
  • If you've entered the wrong username or password, remember that you need to update the Postfix database with postmap for changes to the password file to become effective.

Additional Software

Things I like to add:

Version Checks

Flash is notorious for it's frequently discovered security problems, so make sure to regularly check for updates at Adobe's Flash info page, which shows you the version of Flash you have installed currently.

VMware