OS X 10.11 El Capitan External Volumes Disappeared

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El Capitan, finder does not see external disk, finder does not see volume, OS X 10.11

A while back I was forced to go from OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) to 10.11 (El Capitan) in order to install Photoshop CC 2016.5 I didn’t want to do this as El Capitan a.k.a. El Crap is loaded with bugs. Against my gut feeling I did it.

Today I found a new El Crap bug. I shut down my iMac when the electrical power failed due to a storm and the iMac was running on my CyberPower UPS. The power came back on shortly so I restarted, and I did not see the icons for my two external drives. They were powered up (lights on). Finder did not list them either.

I started terminal and entered:

cd /volumes

ls

and there they were! I went to one of them and was able to navigate directories, see files, etc using terminal. So the volumes existed and were intact.

OK, how to get Finder to see them? Go to the Apple icon on the left edge of the menu bar, click it, pick “force quit”, select Finder. The Force Quit button changes to Relaunch. Press it and Finder relaunches (btw it’s not possible to kill Finder). The volumes mounted and seem OK.

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OS X Mavericks Flush or Empty DNS Cache

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DNS, flush dns cache, os x mavericks

Too geeky? Nah.  I needed to flush or empty the DNS cache on my iMac. DNS means Domain Name System, it is the internet’s tool that maps a human friendly URL such as dagnygromer.wordpress.com to a numeric IP address like 66.155.11.238 The DNS is a distributed system where many domain name registrars maintain these mappings. I needed to change the web host that one of the domains I own maps to, so I logged into my domain account at 1and1.com and made the change.  When I went to the URL, it still went to the old web host. The domain change takes some time to work its way through the distributed DNS so I waited a while – it can take from a few minutes to a few days. Gary was able to get to the new web host OK, I was not. The problem was the out of date domain mapping was being cached by OS X. This is normal and speeds things up, but I had outdated info in my DNS cache so I needed to flush or empty it which forces my computer to get new DNS information from the internet.

Long story I know. Anyway to flush or empty the DNS cache on OS X Mavericks open the terminal application and type or copy and paste in the following line. Then press return or enter.

dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

You’ll be asked to enter an administrative password. sudo means “run this command as a system administrator”.

DNS info comes from specialized servers. To see how your mac accesses the DNS system:  Run System Preferences (click the Apply icon at the top left of your screen for a menu to get to this) then click on Network, then Advanced, then the DNS tab and you will see a list of IP addresses. Each is a DNS server, you generally have a few of these listed. If one is busy or not available OS X tries another one. Don’t alter this list unless you are confident in what you are doing.

Happy 10th Birthday, Mac OS X

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osx apple

OS X is 10 (x in Roman numerals) years old today. Happy Birthday!

New Printer: Samsung ML-2851

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mac, os x, samsung ML-2851

We bought a laser printer, a Samsung ML-2851. It connects to our LAN via an ethernet cable, so it’s available to all our computers. Well, after a major hassle that is. You see, the printer did not ship with the OS X software needed to configure it. I knew I wanted it to have a fixed IP address, I knew what that was by the port on my router. It did ship with a Mac friendly postscript print driver. It has a nice web based set up utility – but we could not get to that until we were able to configure its tcp/ip settings. After quite a bit of frustration it occurred to me to check out the windows programs on the printer CD. We have a windows based netbook, and we found an IP configuration program on it. WHY IS THERE NO OS X IP CONFIGURATION PROGRAM WITH A DEVICE THAT CLAIMS OS X COMPATIBILITY?? The printer test page, generated by holding down the power button for a few seconds, contained the mac address. Once we found this program, the rest was not too bad. Beware that configuring the tcp/ip parameters is not a trivial task, and it required a corresponding change to my router configuration. Not plug and play.

Initial opinion: We like the printer. Print quality is good, it prints duplex (both sides of paper), it’s quiet after an initial warm up. Mac support is seriously deficient.

Discover, iBank Woes and a Fix

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Discover card, ibank, OSX financial software

If you’re using iBank financial software and have a Discover card which was assigned a new card number, you may no longer be able to download transactions. This happened to me. Here is the fix:

• Select the Discover account
• On the top menu, click “Account”
• Select “Disable Account Access”
• On the top menu, click “Account”
• Select “Setup Account Access”
• Enter your Discover user id and password
• Click Download Transactions
• If all is well, your transactions will download to iBank

I had a bizzare transaction download called “Transfer of Balance”. To get my accout right, I entered a transaction for this amount with the sign reversed and my iBank Discover account is now correct.

Discover, this was a pain in the a**. You did not post iBank instructions, only Quicken and MS Money. I was able to figure out what to do after reading those. Discover, not everyone is stuck with a Windows pc. Don’t “diss” your Mac customers.X