Troubleshooting

How to remove photos from your iPhone. Or, this shouldn’t require a post.

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For inexplicable reasons, Photos on the Mac won’t let you delete photos from the iPhone if you forgot to delete them during import (we’re not even getting into how half the time, it never deletes them from a flash card, period). There are times when you import your photos from an iPhone and don’t feel … Read more

DropBox Smart Sync and High Sierra; or, I thought I was supposed to upgrade, why me.

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Not interested in my ramblings? Skip down.

If you’ve been paying attention to the narrative coming from IT over the past few years, including us, one of the most recurring themes is this:

Stay up to date.

Staying up to date is the number one way to keep your hardware running well and, most critically, keep you secure. In the past, this advice came with some wincing, since updates, particularly system updates, could bring along a plethora of issues. This wincing advice was gradually replaced with certainty––Apple Mac OS updates have been more and more robust over the past few years, to the point where I was almost, almost ready to just start pulling the plug and upgrading to the latest version of the OS as soon as it came out.

But lo, Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. High Sierra definitely tooketh away.

I mean, percentage wise, it’s still been pretty painless. There have been some really wince-worthy security issues with High Sierra, but in terms of functional show-stoppers, it’s still in the 10% range. It says a lot about the past few years that this feels really bad.

But one thing that has been completely consistent throughout our High Sierra deployments is that new installs of DropBox do not work with Smart Sync.

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Open Office error in saving “Problem Connecting to Server” or: how not to punch Open Office in the face

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So. In a burst of organizational genius the other day, we changed the default share name on a client server. Lets say the old version was ‘Public’, and the new version was ‘Shared’. What could possibly go wrong, right? Cue the hollow laugh machine.

All went fairly well, until Open Office decided that every time you opened the save dialogue box, freaked out with an error message saying it was having an error connecting to the share ‘Public’. I say ‘freaked out’ because after dismissing it, the error appeared again not once, not twice, but four hundred five thousand times. I definitely counted.

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Unable to load replica list in Yosemite Server, or Active Directory can’t be joined after upgrading

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NOTE: If you have the much more common ‘Ooops, OS X Server just randomly decided to eat the most important part of my configuration’ that can result in the above error, this thread on Apple Discussion forums might prove handy. I’d write it up on the site if I figured out a surefire to fix this outside of just restoring from a OD backup you’ve hopefully made, but it makes me angry that the backups can’t be scheduled, and there is no other way to fix it, so I don’t consider myself to have a ‘fix’ just yet.

I just upgraded a client’s OS X Server from Mavericks to Yosemite 10.10 OS X server. They use Windows Server 2012 for authentication and user services through Active Directory, and the Mac server simply joins to the domain to grab authentication and user/group information.

After the upgrade, Open Directory fired on just fine, and local Open Directory users were hunky dory, but the replica list, which would typically list what AD master had been joined, simply said ‘Unable to load replica list’.

Typically, I get a little trickle of fear anytime OS X server gives me any kind of message about being unable to load anything, because that has led me down some very dark rabbit holes indeed. But this time, just as I was about try and go through the process of re-connecting the AD server (which, by the way, cannot be done with WorkGroup manager anymore) I was lucky enough to google about and stumble on this KB from apple:

http://support.apple.com/en-us/TS4600

It doesn’t pertain to it directly, but it’s close enough. To paraphrase the directions:

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Kyocera Taskalfa and Google Apps SMTP

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I like to keep my titles understandable by everyone, but I’ll fully admit to giving this one a few attempts before giving it all up. Sadly, there’s just not much of a way to talk about sending email from printers without involving acronyms that one would be justified for suspecting of associating with curse words during the night.

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Could not find PPoE server, or: I’m travelling and my Mac went insane

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From time to time, I get an emailf rom clients on the road about a specific problem. I’ll paraphrase:

When I left my house, my perfectly well-behaved Mac went completely mental and pops up gibbeirsh sounding messages what seems like ever two seconds. These messages are always saying the same thing, something about ‘A PPPoE server cannot be found TECH BLAH BLAH BLAH’

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My Printer Stopped Working: or, how to make me unable to pay my bills

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First, a disclaimer: I hate printers. I mean, I really do. It’s a voodoo industry, full of cheap-yet-secretly-expensive devices, that seem intent only on never working exactly as they should. They are consistent in their inconsistency, and reliably rubbish. Inkjet printers have ink that costs enough to make you think they need harvest unicorn blood, and laser printers are the size of a unicorn stall. Or weird little gears and gizmos go out of whack, like some sort of fiendish goblin contraption, and it literally costs more than a computer to get the part replaced.

All that being said, there are a few, tried and true, reliable things that fix 95% of the problems people call me about when it comes to printers. Theres lots of OTHER things that go wrong, but this little procedure is what I always try first, and it generally does the trick.

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iPhone Error 3014: Just because I’m panicking doesn’t mean you should.

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Udate: It’s come to my attention that a number of people are wondering what, exactly, it means if your phone DOES give you an error of 3014. 

In my case, it was caused by Apple’s servers being overloaded, and iTunes couldn’t complete a connection to verify the update – IE, if iTunes can’t talk to the server, you won’t be able to update your phone. The other thing to note is that even just a slow internet connection can muck up your update, or any firewall issues. Bottom line, make sure that your computer has fast, unrestricted access to the internet.

A couple of days ago I, like many other millions of iPhone wielding techies, gleefully downloaded the latest update to the operating system, iOS 5. And it promptly bricked my phone.

I knew something was wrong the moment iTunes informed me, with clinical detachment, that an error of number 3014 had occurred and to please try again.

This is the sort of thing that makes ice trickle down my back when I’m at a client’s house – interrupted installs are never a good thing, in the same way that half-baked meatloaf is never a good thing.

But this wasn’t a client’s phone. I was in the inner sanctum of my office, so to speak, where computers go to be healed, not corrupted. So I spent a few moments frowning and poking and only then did the ice start to trickle on the spine.

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