I stumbled across this problem when a daily cronjob on one of our Debian servers complained about this. A lot. If you run across this on one of your systems, there is a quick fix.

In our case, it turned out that /usr/bin/mandb could not read /etc/passwd because the mode was 0600 rather than 0644. A quick change (chmod 644 /etc/passwd) and things were back to normal.

Thanks to an error report from one of my backup jobs, I noticed that /Users/slap/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports was filling up with Finder crash reports (files of the type *.crash). These files were being created once a minute. Additionally, icons on my Desktop were blinking once a minute.

Upon investigation, it seems that Google Drive was the culprit. Specifically, Google Drive's ability to update icons to indicate their sync stats. By disabling the "Show file sync status icons and right click menu" checkbox in Google Drive's Preferences window, I was able to stop the crashing.

I decided the other night to begin doing some testing using my headless Mac Mini. I use VirtualBox for all my testing on my Mac OS X systems. Since the Mini is headless, I decided now was as a good a time as any to start using VirtualBox via the command line. Obviously, installing VirtualBox via the command line is not the same as running VirtualBox via the command line, but installing any package from the command line must be practiced to be remembered.

Download the latest package. I'm using wget which you'll only have if you've specifically installed it. I use MacPorts, but Homebrew is another option.

$ wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.12/VirtualBox-4.2.12-84980-OSX.dmg

Mount the disk image (.dmg). The disk image contents will now be mounted on /Volumes/VirtualBox.

$ hdiutil mount VirtualBox-4.2.12-84980-OSX.dmg

Now, install the package. Note that the target is set to /. In addition to installing VirtualBox in /Applications, this will also put the command line tools in /usr/bin.

$ sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.pkg -target /

Now unmount the disk image and clean up.

$ hdiutil unmount /Volumes/VirtualBox/
$ rm VirtualBox-4.2.12-84980-OSX.dmg

Download and install the VirtualBox Extension Pack.

$ wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.12/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.12-84980.vbox-extpack
$ sudo VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.12-84980.vbox-extpack
$ rm Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.12-84980.vbox-extpack

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2013-03-07 through 2013-03-10:

• http://eyeseast.github.com/python-tablefu/
  Really looking forward to trying this out. Anyone interested in weighing in with their experiences?
• How to selectively kill queries in MySQL? — dba square | A resource on MySQL
  Especially helpful when you have hundreds of queries that need to die.
• Redis with an SSD swap, not what you want - Antirez weblog

I recently spent six weeks in Sydney working for my new job. Naturally, while I was there, I let Google Chrome's omnibox redirect my searches to Google Australia. Fast forward a few weeks, and I'm back in the States, but Chrome is living in the past. After trying just about everything, here is what I finally did to fix it.

First, shut down Google Chrome. Find the Google Chrome default preferences file. On my Mac, that's ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Preferences. This is a JSON file. You are looking for an attribute called "last_known_google_url". Mine was set to "https://www.google.com.au/". All I did was change this to "https://www.google.com/".

Good luck!