Smelly. Puppy.

Being that I hate every hour backups (well, not the backups, but I hate the volume level of my external drive), and I’m fine with a backup running once a day – here’s how to set Time Machine with a custom interval (until Apple release 10.5.1 which will hopefully address this)

1) In the Time Machine preferences, turn it OFF

2) (We’re built on Unix, yea?) Set up a cron to run backupd-helper (Which is equivilent to the ‘back up now’ selection when you control-click the dock icon)… If ‘crontab -e’, and the vi editor are foreign to you, I’d probably stop, or do a ‘man 5 crontab’ or something from a terminal session. If not, here’s my daily 3am backup:

0 3 * * *        /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper

Every 2 hours, at 15 past the hour would be:

15 */2 * * *    /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper

Stood in line for over an hour to get my hands on my copy of Leopard, got home, install on my 24″ iMac… Install complete. System’s rebooting… Blank blue screen… Then… Nothing… For… Two… Hours

This is happening to a LOT of people (the Apple message boards are lit up now). A fix:

1. Reboot into single-user mode (hold Cmd-S while booting machine)
2. Mount the HD…
/sbin/mount -uw /
3. Remove the following files:
rm -rf /Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane
rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/Application Enhancer.framework
rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Application Enhancer.bundle
rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist
4. Type ‘exit’ to continue the boot process

I’m finally in Leopard! Yeaa! OS tells me I have a system update to apply, and then asks for an admin account’s username/password. I enter what I’ve been entering for years… Nope. Bzzt.

Looking at all the user accounts on my machine (in the prefpane), it appears that none are Admin accounts, and all are ‘standard users’. WTF? This is heavily reported issue as well.

1. Reboot into single user mode again (Cmd-S while booting the machine)
2. Mount the HD mount -uw /
3. Type ‘passwd’, and set the root password
4. Type ‘exit’ to continue booting

… Once you’re in, you can now use the username ‘root’, and the password you picked, for all admin confirmation dialogs. (I still don’t know how to change one of my user accounts to an administrator)

Not too fun of an upgrade…