Apple Snow Leopard and FileVault (part deux)

Updated on Monday, March 29, 2010 at 23:04 by Willem

A while back, I wrote a couple of blog posts about the FileVault quirks in OSX. The problems seemed to be gone with the upgrade to Snow Leopard, but this week I ran into a (new??) 'feature'?

When I remove a directory on a (SMB) file-share it removes the files and directory (or so it seems). But after a couple of seconds the (empty) directory re-appears.

Click to read more ...

Apple Snow Leopard and Filevault

Ran into one of the most annoying bugs in OSX evah.... The earlier versions of OSX had a problem with Filevault and remembering certain default application preferences. This issue is resolved in Snow Leopard, but I ran into another (new) feature.

Whenever I put my MacBook to sleep it closes all running programs and documents (without any save option), and logs me off....
Waking the MacBook back up leaves me with the default log in screen. After the log in, it's like I rebooted the machine...

Need to remember to save before putting it to sleep, or to wander of for a couple of minutes.......

UPDATE: I fixed it. Yesterday I saw a flash of the error reporting tool of OSX while I opened the lid of my MacBook, and before it logged me out on the fly. This meant that there might be some info in the console application.
It turned out there were two applications generating lots of errors. Namely PGP and EyeConnect (some part of EyeTV). Somehow both had come over with the data migration.

After uninstalling PGP manually (because the regular interface didn't work any more) and removing all references to the EyeConnect application everything worked as it should (so far).

UPDATE 2: Never mind the previous cheerful update. LoginWindow keeps crashing. I even reinstalled the compleet OS on a seperate disk and with virtual no apps installed it keeps crashing. So the sleep mode is essentially unusable. I've been thinking of removing the Snow from the Leopard....

Apple Favors Own Products, or FileVaults Screws Up

Apple FileVaultSomething everyone would do I guess (the favoring part at least :) ). But Apple is doing this in a very peculiar way. When you run OSX with a ton of third-party applications you won't notice things, since everything runs as it should. But when you're going to use FileVault, things change. A lot....

FileVault is the way Apple secures your data. When turned on the OS creates a sparse iage of your userdata. So everything stored within your user directory is encrypted using AES-128.

The use of FileVault screws up certain system files. One of those is (or several for that matter) is used to store the default applications. Like FireFox for Internet instead of Safari. Every time you reboot your system the default application settings are read.
This weekend I also found out that at least one handy program also disagrees with FileVault. Little Snitch won't properly save it's registration info when you're using FileVault.

You know what the worst thing is? This BUG is present since Panther (OSX 10.3). I wonder if this is going to be fixed in Snow Leopard. To be honest, I doubt it. If they can't figure it out in 4 years, they probably never will.

As a security savvy nerd I want to use FileVault on my MacBook, but the problems with FileVault made me decide to uninstall this feature. Too bad that there are no other real alternatives. Truecrypt (or PGP) is nice, but it can't encrypt your hard disk (from which you boot) or even your user directory. Check Point seems to have software, but there's no way of buying it easily. So it seems that's it's mainly reserved for corporate environments.

UPDATE: w00t... They solved this annoying 'feature' Apple OS X 10.6 a.k.a. Snow Leopard. Way to go Apple. Although it being several OS releases/years too late!!!!