Cogito ad infinitum
Things learned while researching some technical topics,
written up in case anyone finds them useful.
Subscribe via RSS or see code I’ve written.
My line of work has some legacy system installations that I need to maintain access to, which abruptly became a problem when I finally migrated to an ARM-based Mac running Sonoma as my daily driver.
As part of my preparing a fresh set of Mac VMs on ESXi 6.7u3, I booted each off of the disk images I’d previously created to verify they still worked. All went well until I started on macOS 10.13 High Sierra. It booted fine, the installer launched, but when I clicked the button to begin the install process, it waited… and waited… and then threw an error.
Anyone who’s ever sought to install a macOS / Mac OS X from the past decade within VMware ESXi has discovered the need to first convert the installer application to a bootable disk image file. VMware Fusion will happily create one for you if given an installer application when creating a new VM, but ESXi is not similarly equipped.
In wanting to move my Time Machine backups to a network drive without losing any history, I set to looking up what methods others had used and what quirks to watch out for.
In my line of work, I’ve found it useful to have a USB drive with installers for each version of macOS on separate partitions. Mine was originally stocked with installers for Lion through Catalina, and it worked well.
I have a Mac mini that hosts VMs of every OS X/macOS version from Leopard to Mojave using VMware ESXi 6.0. Because I’m already an old Dutch guy who hates change, I wanted to see if it was possible to get a Catalina VM running without having to upgrade to ESXi 6.5 or 6.7, which would require abandoning its .NET client that I still prefer.
I decided it was time I became familiar with the nuts and bolts of how disks on Macs are partitioned by Disk Utility, and why.
Today while attempting to use System Preferences to delete a user from a macOS 10.13 system and archive their home folder to a disk image, I ran into this error:
I have a Mac running macOS Server providing several services behind a domain name that I’d like to secure with a certificate from Let’s Encrypt, and have it automatically renew. Easy, right?
Mac developers familiar with the Homebrew binary package manager for macOS may also have heard of Tigerbrew, a fork tailored for PowerPC and early Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5.
Although Java 6 hasn’t had a public update since 2013, for years thereafter Apple would periodically release an installer to keep the runtime working on successive versions of OS X/macOS.
For another project, I found myself needing to install Java 6 (a.k.a. 1.6) on Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, both Intel and PowerPC.
At work, we have a quad-core 2012 Mac mini Server (Macmini6,2) that’s been running VMware ESXi from day one. For this reason it’s never had its firmware updated, so today I set about to fix that.
If you have both a Mac laptop and an external display at your desk, you may know this routine: sit down, plug in the cables, drag each application’s windows to your preferred spot on each display, get up for a coffee break, come back and find all your open windows have congregated on a single screen again after your display went to sleep.