Connection Failure

Can’t Launch Photoshop

connectionfailure — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:33:52 +0000

“Could not open a scratch file because the file is locked or you do not have the necessary privileges.

Use the get info command in finder to unlock the file.”

What the? Of all the half-assed error messages! Where is my scratch file located? What are the permissions supposed to be? Deleting Photoshop’s preferences doesn’t fix this problem. Looking in /tmp, we found an Adobe file in there. Deleting that didn’t work either. The user is not an admin, and shouldn’t have to be.

Google has some other occurrences of this issue, such as this and this none of which are really useful. You know what worked? Restarting the the computer!

Switching off OCSP in Firefox

connectionfailure — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:53:35 +0000

Recently we came across this issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3384801 of Captive Portal Hijacking not working in Firefox 7.0.1 on both Windows and Mac, and on the Mac using OS X 10.7.2 Safari and Keychain Access would both hang.

I quickly made these instructions on how to (temporarily) disable OCSP in Firefox. Please note that this lowers the security of Firefox so do this at your own risk.

1. Visit the about:config URL in Firefox

2. Click the I’ll be careful, I promise button.

3. Search for OSCP in the Filter search field

4. Double click anywhere on that line and change the 1 to a 0. Then click OK or press Return.

Further reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCSP

Keychain Error

connectionfailure — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 02:34:40 +0000

A few days ago I started having problems syncing my MobileMe from my work mac.

Now I know that it’s all academic as it will be superceded by iCloud, but still.

Upon visiting System Preferences, I instantly get

There was a problem saving to your keychain. Try again or use Keychain Access to verify your keychain.

The console says

Error: SecKeychainItemCopyContent() returned error -25293 while reading in MobileMe password.
— last message repeated 3 times —
System Preferences[xxxxx]: Error: SecKeychainItemModifyAttributesAndData() returned error -25293.

I do not have a clue why this is happening. Talk to me people.

Address Book strangeness in 10.6.4

connectionfailure — Sun, 22 May 2011 04:54:11 +0000

The Address Book launched fine, but in the left column where you would normally expect to see Directory Services and groups, it was blank.

The Plus button did nothing. You also couldn’t load individual records either.

And this was a system-wide issue- changing users didn’t work.

The console complained thusly:

DS is configured, but a DSSource could not be configured. Could not load local source

In addition the console reported a few quiet crashes in the background, but nothing really useful- the app wasn’t quitting unexpectedly.

Although an Apple-included piece of software, Repairing Permissions as usual did nothing.

Here’s the fix: ran the upgrade from 10.6.4 to 10.6.5. The combo update could have worked as well, so if you were already on 10.6.7 then re-apply the last update you applied, either the 10.6.6-> 10.6.7 or the Combo.

Hopefully it works for you too!

What font is this? TuringMini.ttf

connectionfailure — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 02:03:42 +0000

Here I am looking up phonetic fonts and I come across this page. OK, cool, lets have a look at the source.

@font-face { font-family: "Turing"; src: url(TuringMini.ttf) }
@font-face { font-family: "Turing"; font-style: italic; src: url(TuringI.ttf) }

TuringMini, sounds good. Search on gooble. Nothing. Try all my gooble-fu. Only dead ends, and some Canadian deadware called Turing that is some kind of programming environment.
What about the PDF? Let’s check that.

http://connectionfailure.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/moz-screenshot.png

Yep, Acrobat thinks it’s called “Turing” as well. But where does it come from.
Eventually more goobling found a “turing.ttf”. I grabbed that. Doing a get info on it, it says that one is Frutiger_Light_Tuca Light which also doesn't exist on the web until now. It also looks nothing like the Turing
on the web page & PDF so that must be a red herring.

Anyone else heard of it? Custom made perhaps?

Mac OS error -3285

connectionfailure — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 02:41:23 +0000

Hi readers,
The error that no one else seems to have had is Mac OS error -3285.
I got this using Fetch while trying to connect to an internal FTP server in another domain.
We use Threat Management Gateway (TMG). This has SOCKS 4 enabled, but I couldn’t quite get the settings right.
The error therefore has something to do with your Proxy server settings.
The way TMG accepted my request was:
#1- added domain\ in front of username
#2- put the address of the server i was trying to connect to in the “Do no use proxy for” field.
I was able to connect. Your kilometerage may vary.

Playing with pcAnywhere on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

connectionfailure — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 01:01:06 +0000

Seeing how we have a licence for pcAnywhere, I thought I’d give it a try.

Symantec likes to use Java to claim they have Mac support, rather than developing native software. Thus, User Interfaces and other admin tools suffer as a result.

There is a KnowledgeBase article here. So firstly you will find on their forums that you need to run this:

udo chmod 774 /Applications/pcAnywhere CrossPlatform.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub

Or it won’t run at all.

Then, when you run the thinHost app, (Host ->Launch) you get

Could not locate thinhost file java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "/usr/local/lib/pcAnywhere/ThinHost" (in directory "/usr/local/lib/pcAnywhere"): error=13, Permission denied

Posts like this will get you nowhere, as they are for Leopard 10.5.

Will keep y’all posted…

Installing Fedora 14 on Mac using Parallels 5

connectionfailure — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 01:24:26 +0000

I had trouble upgrading Fedora Core 10 to 14 without using a DVD. It just isn’t as easy as Ubuntu.
Lots of dependency issues that I couldn’t find the time to resolve.
I also killed the whole FC10. So.. time to download the .iso of version 14.

Anyway, I tried using the “Express Install” option in Parallels, and it wasn’t happy. It says the /iso is in use.
The “Typical” option seems to boot from the .iso just fine, and is letting me install it now.

Update: installs fine, but I can’t install Parallels Tools. There is an error. The log file (which is in the VM, thank you for forgetting to tell me Parallels)

The error seems to be about downloading the stuff that the Tools needs.

Lots of:

PYCURL ERROR 5

A websearch finds real Fedora users are experiencing this error too, but it appears to be rare. Maybe I could download the stuff it needs, but where to put it? Oh Linux, how you mock me so.

Perhaps Parallels 6 is more Fedora 14-aware?

iMovie Error -6662 Exporting to QuickTime

connectionfailure — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:59:00 +0000

iMovie giving me trouble

I can’t find anyone else on the intarwebs that has posted about this error.

I am trying H.264 compression, 1920×1080, AAC audio…

Help!

I was able to successfully export by changing the export options.

After a few more, I now have a -108 error.

Acrobat Pro Pages Panel Problem

connectionfailure — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:03:59 +0000

A user reported a problem with Acrobat Pro 9.3.4 running on Mac OS X 10.5.8.

The Pages panel does not scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. I am clueless as to why this happens, but I post here so that you, dear reader, know that you are not alone.

The panel thinks it's at the bottom, when it clearly isn't

No troubleshooting steps have been undertaken, but my guess is deleting the Acrobat preferences. Any suggestions Internet?