[filsmick]

I was bitten by this this week. Tried to reuse my installer to install OS X El Capitan on a MBP without redownloading it over my super-fast 2Mbps internet connection.

First, I try to install it by just copying the installer app - "can't be verified".

Then I make a bootable USB stick using DiskMaker X - "can't be verified". I run an integrity check on the installer - all good.

I then try running `/path/to/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USB-STICK --applicationpath /path/to/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app --nointeraction` - "can't be verified".

Finally I give up and the system is installed via the App Store. The download fails once, it finally completes, and I am left clueless as to why I couldn't reuse the old installer.

An "expired certificate" error message would have saved me many hours. It's unfortunate for the user that Apple puts so little emphasis on letting them be their own tech support.

[mikeash]

Apple is just awful about providing meaningful, useful errors. The worst is AirPlay. When it fails to connect, which is about 33% of the time, there's nothing. It doesn't even pop up a generic alert, it just silently (or not so silently, if you're playing music) reverts to local playback.

Many other examples abound. Most errors at least provide a message, but one so generic as to be useless.

[pyre]

Ugh. At work, the computers use AirWatch. Oh. My. God. They fill the OSX logs with debug messages. Literally "I got 8 bytes from this with this offset" type messages for an application that spends most of its time running in the background. Here is an example:

  2016-03-03 10:59:16.863 PM AirWatch Agent[507]: void AgentReadCallback(NSData *__strong, NSFileHandle *__strong) [Line 1096] Agent received message of type 140
  2016-03-03 10:59:16.863 PM AirWatch Agent[507]: -[AWAgentController isCurrentUserManaged] [Line 221] Current User is managed
  2016-03-03 10:59:16.863 PM AirWatch Agent[507]: Server Starting new loop for data
  2016-03-03 10:59:26.825 PM AirWatch Agent[507]: void AgentReadCallback(NSData *__strong, NSFileHandle *__strong) [Line 1096] Agent received message of type 140
  2016-03-03 10:59:26.831 PM AirWatch Agent[507]: -[AWAgentController isCurrentUserManaged] [Line 221] Current User is managed
  2016-03-03 10:59:26.832 PM AirWatch Agent[507]: Server Starting new loop for data

Is this normal operating procedure for OSX apps? Fill the system.log with print statements in a loop that runs every ~10 seconds?

[rbritton]

It is for those that leave their debug logging enabled. A lot of code I've seen uses CocoaLumberjack[0] or something similar, which makes it easy to turn that off for production builds.

[0]: https://github.com/CocoaLumberjack/CocoaLumberjack

[x0x0]

or TimeMachine

"sparsebundle already in use" is the FOAD of error messages. I do love how the (now stale) tools to fix this are maintained by a volunteer on an external site unrelated to apple.

I try not to be too grumpy about it, but I paid $3k for a laptop not to have to fucking deal with windows-style normal operation of the OS and related tools is busted and you're gonna sink hours into debugging it. And least when linux breaks it tends to leave error messages and details in syslog...

[username223]

My latest pet peeve is `mds_stores` deciding it needs to spend forever using my iPod, so I can't unplug it without incurring a scolding. It's not hard for Mac OS to stay less terrible to configure than Linux, and less terrible to use than Windows, but that's a low bar.

[r00fus]

Do you have your iPod configured in iTunes with "Enable disk use"? Sounds like Spotlight is trying to index it or something...

[username223]

I probably do. Thanks to my partial understanding of how the software works, I can guess that `mds_` is Spotlight trying to index my music player, but I wouldn't want to try to explain it to my dad. Software that responds to "eject this" with "no, because f* you" because it is busy creating meta-data is user-hostile.

[13thLetter]

I switched from OSX Yosemite to Windows 8.1 a while back.

I have had substantially fewer problems with Windows 8.1.

[misterdata]

Just yesterday I performed a clean install of Windows 10 on my desktop work computer. After joining our domain (configured in the most standard way possible), the start menu stopped working and edge couldn't start anymore. All commands to fix this situation (through powershell) gave cryptic hexadecimal error codes. After a few hours it turns out the Windows Firewall service was disabled. How this causes the Start Menu to malfunction, I don't know...

Again this was a clean installation. Windows 10 is a joke.

[x0x0]

hmm. windows 10's inability to not talk to microsoft skeeves me out though.

[digi_owl]

> And least when linux breaks it tends to leave error messages and details in syslog...

Tends to. Not directly a Linux issue, but i was trying to figure out why one specific program was giving me corrupted MAC errors when connecting via sftp.

All searches indicated it was a network config issue, but no changes seemed to matter.

Eventually i checked the libs the program was compiled with and found the sftp one was "jurassic". One update later and no more errors.

that said, more often than not, a quick dmesg or tail /var/log/messages is all that i need to get something purring again.

[Cieplak]

Yeah, diagnostic messages can be pretty useless. Sometimes all you can do is

    tail -f /var/log/system.log

[LordKano]

I go back to the days of System Bombs and Unimplemented Trap errors.

It was maddening.

[steveax]

Ahh the bomb, a great (Susan Kare) icon:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon)

MacsBug was an essential utility back in those days.

[LordKano]

I never got around to learning to use MacsBug.

I just stopped running applications that caused too many crashes.

I miss those days dearly. I LOVED being a Mac user during the 1990s.

[gherkin0]

That's pretty terrible. No software performs flawlessly, so good error messages are a key part of usability.

[mikeash]

I think Apple is trending away from being usable and towards looking usable. Simple, friendly error messages look much better....

[cpg]

Changing the date in the system (and disabling network time) worked well. A quick search led me to this solution, avoiding the whole re-download to please the sentient dictatorial master.

[contingencies]

super-fast 2Mbps internet connection

Don't complain. Even with torrents and 100Mbps fiber, we max out at 1MB/sec here. It reportedly costs 20,000CNY/month (~USD$4500) for an uninhibited 512k connection out of mainland China, if you can get it. (You generally can't.)

[comex]

Not that that isn't awful, but 2Mbps is 4 times slower than 1MB/s...

[contingencies]

Sure. Actually we rarely get even that, except on domestic transfers. 1MB/sec is best-case, torrent-only scenario ~1-5AM. Makes you value mirror operators.

[mystikal]

Around 300 kB/sec lets you get 1GB/hour, which means you can get a perfectly watchable 1080p movie in 2 hours. Yes it's nice now that I have 3 MB/sec down, but it wasn't hell before and I lived with that for 10+ years. Many people still have this kind of connection - typically billed as 5000 down / 800 up. Streaming, I have no idea.

[contingencies]

Rest assured, I don't use the internet to download television.

[mystikal]

Oh, that's interesting. Sorry for stereotyping you as a torrent user. What kind of large files are you downloading?

[phusion]

YOU don't complain, even though it's slow, at least it isn't metered :/

I get 10GB/mo and it's $15 for every GB I go over. I'm a "giant pirate" and would usually go through that in an afternoon when I had comcrap. Oh well.

[marvy]

$15/GB is a lot. My cell phone plan charges only $5.

[sdm]

There is something wrong with your connection; where are you? I'm in Suzhou, I have no problem maxing out my connection downloading things outside of the GFW. It starts slow but speeds up about a minute in usually. With VPN turned on I am capped at about 10Mbps. Direct lines are easy to get, we had one for a while but decided getting everyone needed a connection, a VPN account was enough. We were paying US$2k for a 10Mbps "dedicated line" to HK.

[contingencies]

You're next to Shanghai. I'm in Yunnan. Different world.

[hrrsn]

I was hit by this issue too. Everything that came up online (and worked in the past) was to reset the date in the Terminal. Of course, that didn't help in the slightest.

[blacksmith_tb]

But if you quickly use sudo .../createinstallmedia to make a bootable usb installer from your annoyingly re-downloaded App store installer, you should be safe from this, shouldn't you? That's what I did when I installed, but I haven't tried to use my usb installer, so I suppose it could have expired too. (edit) Sigh, yes, expired also. Re-downloading...

[newxan]

Encountered the exact same issue. But all kind of weird bugs turned up in the older version of App Store, to the point where I had to re-format the drive. And the Apple forums are absolutely no help. took me 3 hours to do something that should have been trivial..