Mac OS X firewall vs. DHCP I’ve been having some issues with Mac OS X not being able to configure itself with DHCP. It looks like the firewall was blocking DHCP responses. Quick solution was to turn off the firewall. Longer-term solution may be that I need to reinstall configd and mDNSResponder from the latest Mac OS X update, so that they are signed correctly, so that the firewall trusts them again.
Macbook Pro overheating It appears reinstalling Mac OS X Leopard has done something to the default fan settings on my work MBP. I’ve had problems today with the GPU overheating (triggered by several minutes of Spotlight indexing things). I’ve installed smcFanControl2 and cranked the default fan speed up to 3,000 rpm. This seems to be keeping the GPU temperature under control.
FileVault ate my home directory Yesterday I upgraded my work Macbook Pro from OS X Tiger 10.4 to Leopad 10.5.6. It was not an entirely smooth experience. After upgrading to Leopard, it all appeared to work fine – everything seemd intact. I ran the software updates tool, and it downloaded some updates. I needed to reboot. I use FileVault to encrypt my home directory, to protect all the confidential data on it.
Occasional lock-ups due to Parallels & FileVault? I’ve been running a Windows VM under Parallels on my work Mac. I have my home directory encrypted using FileVault. I’ve had ~5 lock-ups in the past 6 months where my Mac has just locked hard. It always seems to happen when I’m using a Windows VM. I’ve allocated 768 MB of RAM to the Windows VM. The Mac has 2 GB of physical RAM.
3 mobile broadband on Mac I got some mobile broadband from 3 to cope with a two-week gap in my wired broadband provision. I had some pain getting it to work on my work Macbook Pro (which is a US one) running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.x). The software gave me an obscure error – "internal error 5370" or similar – when running the 3 Connection Manager software. According to a techie in the 3 store I went to, I needed to download the latest drivers from the 3 website.
FileVault I enabled FileVault home directory encryption on my work Macbook Pro the other day, which is running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). I was a little bit hesitant about doing this, because of various horror stories about it not working, or performance being terrible. I made sure I had a proper backup, before starting the process. The 160 GB hard disk was about 40% full before I started. It took 1.