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> "I have a early-2009 “octo” Mac Pro [...]" > > OS: macOS Does this make anyone else a bit uncomfortable? I don't think MacOS is still receiving security up

by Aeolos 6y ago

> "I have a early-2009 “octo” Mac Pro [...]" > > OS: macOS Does this make anyone else a bit uncomfortable? I don't think MacOS is still receiving security updates on that hardware. I'm all for using old hardware for as long as it keeps working, but I would never browse the internet with a vulnerable OS on a vulnerable processor (spectre etc...) Or am I missing something?

lunixbochs 6y ago
They're possibly something like a dosdude patcher or modified bootloader to run an OS like Catalina on it.
- Alupis 6y ago
  I have trouble understanding why people go through these hoops. Yeah, I get it, people love their Mac's... but the company that produces them actively undermines your ability to continue using perfectly good hardware past what they feel is "profitable". This leads to huge efforts to hack/reverse the updaters, or alter newer OS versions to trick them into installing, etc. I'd personally jump over to some system that doesn't hate it's users nearly as much. But, that's just me.
  - boardwaalk 6y ago
    Do you really need to pivot into Apple bashing on this thread? It’s not really on topic or needed.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    It's not out of some love for Macs. I have a 2008 MacBook running Catalina and it's simply because the cost of replacing it is >0. If this works and works well(and it does) then why would I get rid of it? Just to spite apple, which doesn't care either way? I also have a 2005 car that still runs - should I get rid of it because the company that made it stopped providing any kind of support for it long time ago? Or you know....keep using it because it works?
    - Alupis 6y ago
      Maybe it was easy for you to modify your OS to continue updating, or you downloaded some ISO of Catalina someone else pre-hacked for you - but it was certainly a non-trivial effort for whoever figured out how to trick the OS into installing and/or updating. It just seems like wasted effort, since the company all this supports really has made it clear they do not want you to have this ability, and can at any moment make future updates break everything all over again, leading to a new effort to reverse engineer the changes.
      - gambiting 6y ago
        So I don't agree, and I will use the car analogy again - old cars are not "supported" in any way and yet many people keep them going. There's serious engineering effort to make the parts, to write new software, to improve existing firmware etc. By your logic, that's also "wasted" effort since the manufacturer chooses to abandon cars after just few years, so why would you keep them going. I feel the same way about computers - like, who gives a damn what apple thinks. I have a laptop that is still going because people keep making it compatible. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
        Alupis 6y ago
        The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations. Very few non-classic and/or popular cars receive massive aftermarket support for all parts - often the aftermarket supports parts that are in common with a lot of vehicles or are vehicle-agnostic (such as belts, etc), and in some cases you're plain SOL (try replacing an airbag on a 1993 Dodge Caravan, for example - all you can find are OEM used ones pulled from junkers). I think your comparison would be more apt if, say, Ford disabled all vehicles that were 10 years + 1 day old. While Apple isn't disabling your OS, they leave you exposed without security patches, etc... - making it approximately the same.
        6y ago
  - throwaway1777 6y ago
    As opposed to how “easy” it is to install Linux this doesn’t seem half bad.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      What do you mean? You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS.
      - reaperducer 6y ago
        You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS. If only it was that easy all the time. I have an old laptop (2017) that I wasn't for anything else, using so I tried putting Linux on it. Nope. I went through five distributions before I found one that would finally work. And then, it was not really useable. The whole reason people use MacOS is because they know what to expect. Linux is still a crapshoot.
        fuzxi 6y ago
        YMMV. I've installed several distros on my old laptop (2010) and never had any issues. Currently running Manjaro on it.
  - rsync 6y ago
    I agree with this. It's why a hackintosh has never appealed to me. However, in this case, the tweak I needed to do to the mac pro was so trivial as to be (essentially) cost-free. No need to alter the installer, etc. It pleases me to be (re)using this machine for over 12 years now - especially given what a triumph of workstation design these mac pros were ...
    - Alupis 6y ago
      My last personal desktop was about 11 years old when I retired it. It had an AMD Phenom II 965, just to emphasize it's age. It started life with Windows 7 (Win7 was like a month old at the time) and was subsequently upgraded to Windows 8, then Windows 8.1, then finally Windows 10 (and all it's "feature" updates) until it was retired. It ran slower than a new system, but fit my needs perfectly. If Microsoft had arbitrarily decided I wasn't allowed to run Windows 10 on that hardware, it's very likely I would have installed Linux or BSD - after all, the hardware was a non-trivial investment and discarding it purely to please some company really rubs me the wrong way. So, I guess I can sort of understand why people jump through these hoops... although personally I would just move onto some other OS that doesn't undermine my ability to operate my personal computer.
      - NortySpock 6y ago
        Hah, I am still occasionally using my AMD Phenom II 955 as an occasional gaming PC... I admit it now is powered off more than half the time. Anyways, similar story: I'm not about to put up with Microsoft telling me my machine is too old to us; that just promotes e-waste.
    - noir_lord 6y ago
      I like to get that kind of use out of my machines though I upgrade workstation on a more regular basis (though the last one went a full 7 years with nothing new but a RAM upgrade and an SSD midlife) - You come to identify with the hardware after a while, it takes on a life of it's own. Since I'm (excluding Win10 for gaming when I rarely have time) exclusively a Linux user I get to use the old hardware for other purposes at the end until it finally becomes either useless or lets out the magic smoke (as my 2004 R50e Thinkpad finally did - man I miss those keyboards, so much better than the T470P (which itself is excellent)). It paid of just recently, I had 2012 Vostro 3750 kicking around and when schools went into lockdown with a quick wipe and Fedora install it made a perfectly serviceable machine for my step-son to do his remote learning on - there was an irony in running MS Teams on Linux on a machine that wouldn't have been able to run current generation Windows 10 and Teams anywhere near as comfortably.
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    Linux just isn't plug and play enough yet to make the switch less painful than dealing with the pain-points created by anti-consumer practices by Apple and Microsoft on MacOS and Windows, even for technically literate people. I made the switch a year ago after having reached my breaking point with Windows and it still was a massive pain and daily loss of performance. For comparison, I also rooted my Android phone and installed LineageOS without google services which crippled it significantly and it still wasn't as much as a pain to do as using Linux on my workstation. People often say (not talking about you, just something I see on HN often) that it's easy nowadays and anyone can use it but it's not been my experience and I think it's the very attitude that keeps it from being a commonplace OS for the consumer market. I keep a list in a file I call "linux sins" but without having to look at it you can figure out the problem by just googling any benign problem someone might encounter on their OS and checking the answers. Do the answers start with "Click there" or "Open your terminal"? I don't see the situation changing since people who develop for linux generally refuse to acknowledge the problem.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      Fair criticisms. We're still waiting for the fabled "year of the linux desktop". Although, I feel the specific issues you raise are less of a problem on a desktop-focused distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Those distros really focus on a complete desktop experience, and really try to never require a user to drop into a shell to get anything done. So, perhaps it's a case of people using the "wrong" distro for their needs?
      - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
        I'm afraid the issues I describe have been with Ubuntu. Here's the first line from my "linux sins" file as an example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-caching-mechanism https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-cac... If you copy a large file to a USB drive on either Ubuntu or Mint the progress bar goes to 100% instantly and closes and the actual transfer of the file is done in the background without the knowledge of the user. And the answer is "It's your fault, just try to eject the drive until it works." And even beyond the OS, the whole software ecosystem is broken. It's impossible to find simple, working UIs for the most basic pieces of software, everything goes through the commandline.
  - cpach 6y ago
    Every operating system/hardware combination has its own pros and cons. For you, it seems the cons outnumber the pros when it comes to macOS and Apple hardware. Fair enough. For me, I see no major reasons to consider anything else than Mac. I really enjoy using both the OS and the hardware. To each their own.
rsync 6y ago
"Or am I missing something?" Yes, one minor thing ... Although you are correct that Apple is not officially supporting the latest versions of OSX on that hardware, there is a trivially easy hack of the system that will allow you to load newer versions of OSX. So, like many of you, I am not running Catalina but I am running an updated, patched version of OSX.
- gambiting 6y ago
  I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro running Catalina that I still use daily. As far as I can tell it still receives security updates. There's a simple patcher you can use for these old macbooks: http://dosdude1.com/catalina/ http://dosdude1.com/catalina/
- SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
  Neat, does that include System Integrity Protection and Authenticated Root Volume on your hardware?
  - dinglefairy 6y ago
    from what i remember open core doesn't need to disable sip to function, just to install. the firmware is the actual firmware upgrades released by apple [everyone was shocked they supported this] that come embedded in the osx updates. my updates worked fine. I'm pretty sure sip gets re-enabled each boot, but to check for authenticated root volume i think i need to install the g20 to run crutil or whatever it is.
- dinglefairy 6y ago
  happy to hear that I'm not the only one [sys admin type person] doing this. although i use Windows, i do have Catalina installed [and Debian for the triple boot]. also using open core. I'm pretty sure i downloaded a copy of osx from one of their repositories 0.o I'm super lazy, it's really not that hard. my average cost for hardware since i bought my Mac is now less than 400/year CDN. is it worth it? while I'm slightly concerned about the security [I'm probably the biggest risk anyways since I'm not confident in my knowledge of secops], i get 95 fps playing pubg, can edit in 4k, run 100+ tracks in Cubase, and run 3 different OSes or as many vms as you'd like [which i think can also run bare metal vm on the 144 firmware upgrade]. on top of that the case still looks good and I've kept at least 50+lbs of ewaste out of landfills or whatever... seems pretty worth it [hopefully no one ever tries to steal pictures of my cats] [we could also get into a discussion about the right to repair bill in the EU, talking this way] do you game? i feel like that might have been intentionally left out of the interview? what info would you keep unencrypted on your servers? how much does a colo cost for a 2u server typically? how about back in 06? is rsync a good solution for video files backup? what are the benefits over say, running a home server and keeping physical backups at your friends house or iron mountain or something? can rsync use 'live' encrypted data? in other words, how do you encrypt/decrypt on the fly? say for streaming an mp3 or something? [not that you would do this if you were paying per GB...] please excuse my ignorance. I'm not a real sys admin, just an old wanna be hacker that could never get his shit together.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
For many versions of MacOS you can just edit a plist file to get it to install on unsupported hardware. When I've done this there were no stability or performance issues, but YMMV depending on what OS and hardware versions you try.
Sunspark 6y ago
Browsers have put in patches for Spectre. I turned off Spectre and Meltdown in my OS because I wasn't willing to live with the performance hit for a scenario that is unlikely to befall me. I think it's fine if the Mac Pro is using a completely up to date browser and isn't installing new random applications.
bluedino 6y ago
>> I would never browse the internet with a vulnerable OS on a vulnerable processor (spectre etc...) You might be paranoid. I've been browsing on a few 2008/2009 obsolete Macs for a while, on the highest OS that they will run. Eventually they'll be a pain to use because of browser incompatibility, pages will get even more bloated and these machines will run them even slower.
cmckn 6y ago
I have one of the 2008 Mac Pro’s running the k8s control plane at home. Those things just never die.

by Aeolos 6y ago

lunixbochs 6y ago

They're possibly something like a dosdude patcher or modified bootloader to run an OS like Catalina on it.

Alupis 6y ago
I have trouble understanding why people go through these hoops. Yeah, I get it, people love their Mac's... but the company that produces them actively undermines your ability to continue using perfectly good hardware past what they feel is "profitable". This leads to huge efforts to hack/reverse the updaters, or alter newer OS versions to trick them into installing, etc. I'd personally jump over to some system that doesn't hate it's users nearly as much. But, that's just me.
- boardwaalk 6y ago
  Do you really need to pivot into Apple bashing on this thread? It’s not really on topic or needed.
- gambiting 6y ago
  It's not out of some love for Macs. I have a 2008 MacBook running Catalina and it's simply because the cost of replacing it is >0. If this works and works well(and it does) then why would I get rid of it? Just to spite apple, which doesn't care either way? I also have a 2005 car that still runs - should I get rid of it because the company that made it stopped providing any kind of support for it long time ago? Or you know....keep using it because it works?
  - Alupis 6y ago
    Maybe it was easy for you to modify your OS to continue updating, or you downloaded some ISO of Catalina someone else pre-hacked for you - but it was certainly a non-trivial effort for whoever figured out how to trick the OS into installing and/or updating. It just seems like wasted effort, since the company all this supports really has made it clear they do not want you to have this ability, and can at any moment make future updates break everything all over again, leading to a new effort to reverse engineer the changes.
    - gambiting 6y ago
      So I don't agree, and I will use the car analogy again - old cars are not "supported" in any way and yet many people keep them going. There's serious engineering effort to make the parts, to write new software, to improve existing firmware etc. By your logic, that's also "wasted" effort since the manufacturer chooses to abandon cars after just few years, so why would you keep them going. I feel the same way about computers - like, who gives a damn what apple thinks. I have a laptop that is still going because people keep making it compatible. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        The difference there is you're not violating some TOS or EULA by replacing parts on your classic car, and when you change your oil (do OS updates) there's no chance of suddenly your transmission refusing to allow you to shift gears until you perform more heroics and disable the artificial limitations. Very few non-classic and/or popular cars receive massive aftermarket support for all parts - often the aftermarket supports parts that are in common with a lot of vehicles or are vehicle-agnostic (such as belts, etc), and in some cases you're plain SOL (try replacing an airbag on a 1993 Dodge Caravan, for example - all you can find are OEM used ones pulled from junkers). I think your comparison would be more apt if, say, Ford disabled all vehicles that were 10 years + 1 day old. While Apple isn't disabling your OS, they leave you exposed without security patches, etc... - making it approximately the same.
        6y ago
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  As opposed to how “easy” it is to install Linux this doesn’t seem half bad.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    What do you mean? You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      You download an ISO, put it on a USB key or burn it to a CD, and install it like you would Windows10 or any other OS. If only it was that easy all the time. I have an old laptop (2017) that I wasn't for anything else, using so I tried putting Linux on it. Nope. I went through five distributions before I found one that would finally work. And then, it was not really useable. The whole reason people use MacOS is because they know what to expect. Linux is still a crapshoot.
      - fuzxi 6y ago
        YMMV. I've installed several distros on my old laptop (2010) and never had any issues. Currently running Manjaro on it.
- rsync 6y ago
  I agree with this. It's why a hackintosh has never appealed to me. However, in this case, the tweak I needed to do to the mac pro was so trivial as to be (essentially) cost-free. No need to alter the installer, etc. It pleases me to be (re)using this machine for over 12 years now - especially given what a triumph of workstation design these mac pros were ...
  - Alupis 6y ago
    My last personal desktop was about 11 years old when I retired it. It had an AMD Phenom II 965, just to emphasize it's age. It started life with Windows 7 (Win7 was like a month old at the time) and was subsequently upgraded to Windows 8, then Windows 8.1, then finally Windows 10 (and all it's "feature" updates) until it was retired. It ran slower than a new system, but fit my needs perfectly. If Microsoft had arbitrarily decided I wasn't allowed to run Windows 10 on that hardware, it's very likely I would have installed Linux or BSD - after all, the hardware was a non-trivial investment and discarding it purely to please some company really rubs me the wrong way. So, I guess I can sort of understand why people jump through these hoops... although personally I would just move onto some other OS that doesn't undermine my ability to operate my personal computer.
    - NortySpock 6y ago
      Hah, I am still occasionally using my AMD Phenom II 955 as an occasional gaming PC... I admit it now is powered off more than half the time. Anyways, similar story: I'm not about to put up with Microsoft telling me my machine is too old to us; that just promotes e-waste.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    I like to get that kind of use out of my machines though I upgrade workstation on a more regular basis (though the last one went a full 7 years with nothing new but a RAM upgrade and an SSD midlife) - You come to identify with the hardware after a while, it takes on a life of it's own. Since I'm (excluding Win10 for gaming when I rarely have time) exclusively a Linux user I get to use the old hardware for other purposes at the end until it finally becomes either useless or lets out the magic smoke (as my 2004 R50e Thinkpad finally did - man I miss those keyboards, so much better than the T470P (which itself is excellent)). It paid of just recently, I had 2012 Vostro 3750 kicking around and when schools went into lockdown with a quick wipe and Fedora install it made a perfectly serviceable machine for my step-son to do his remote learning on - there was an irony in running MS Teams on Linux on a machine that wouldn't have been able to run current generation Windows 10 and Teams anywhere near as comfortably.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  Linux just isn't plug and play enough yet to make the switch less painful than dealing with the pain-points created by anti-consumer practices by Apple and Microsoft on MacOS and Windows, even for technically literate people. I made the switch a year ago after having reached my breaking point with Windows and it still was a massive pain and daily loss of performance. For comparison, I also rooted my Android phone and installed LineageOS without google services which crippled it significantly and it still wasn't as much as a pain to do as using Linux on my workstation. People often say (not talking about you, just something I see on HN often) that it's easy nowadays and anyone can use it but it's not been my experience and I think it's the very attitude that keeps it from being a commonplace OS for the consumer market. I keep a list in a file I call "linux sins" but without having to look at it you can figure out the problem by just googling any benign problem someone might encounter on their OS and checking the answers. Do the answers start with "Click there" or "Open your terminal"? I don't see the situation changing since people who develop for linux generally refuse to acknowledge the problem.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    Fair criticisms. We're still waiting for the fabled "year of the linux desktop". Although, I feel the specific issues you raise are less of a problem on a desktop-focused distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Those distros really focus on a complete desktop experience, and really try to never require a user to drop into a shell to get anything done. So, perhaps it's a case of people using the "wrong" distro for their needs?
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
      I'm afraid the issues I describe have been with Ubuntu. Here's the first line from my "linux sins" file as an example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-caching-mechanism https://askubuntu.com/questions/1151283/disable-nautilus-cac... If you copy a large file to a USB drive on either Ubuntu or Mint the progress bar goes to 100% instantly and closes and the actual transfer of the file is done in the background without the knowledge of the user. And the answer is "It's your fault, just try to eject the drive until it works." And even beyond the OS, the whole software ecosystem is broken. It's impossible to find simple, working UIs for the most basic pieces of software, everything goes through the commandline.
- cpach 6y ago
  Every operating system/hardware combination has its own pros and cons. For you, it seems the cons outnumber the pros when it comes to macOS and Apple hardware. Fair enough. For me, I see no major reasons to consider anything else than Mac. I really enjoy using both the OS and the hardware. To each their own.

rsync 6y ago

"Or am I missing something?" Yes, one minor thing ... Although you are correct that Apple is not officially supporting the latest versions of OSX on that hardware, there is a trivially easy hack of the system that will allow you to load newer versions of OSX. So, like many of you, I am not running Catalina but I am running an updated, patched version of OSX.

gambiting 6y ago
I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro running Catalina that I still use daily. As far as I can tell it still receives security updates. There's a simple patcher you can use for these old macbooks: http://dosdude1.com/catalina/ http://dosdude1.com/catalina/
SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
Neat, does that include System Integrity Protection and Authenticated Root Volume on your hardware?
- dinglefairy 6y ago
  from what i remember open core doesn't need to disable sip to function, just to install. the firmware is the actual firmware upgrades released by apple [everyone was shocked they supported this] that come embedded in the osx updates. my updates worked fine. I'm pretty sure sip gets re-enabled each boot, but to check for authenticated root volume i think i need to install the g20 to run crutil or whatever it is.
dinglefairy 6y ago
happy to hear that I'm not the only one [sys admin type person] doing this. although i use Windows, i do have Catalina installed [and Debian for the triple boot]. also using open core. I'm pretty sure i downloaded a copy of osx from one of their repositories 0.o I'm super lazy, it's really not that hard. my average cost for hardware since i bought my Mac is now less than 400/year CDN. is it worth it? while I'm slightly concerned about the security [I'm probably the biggest risk anyways since I'm not confident in my knowledge of secops], i get 95 fps playing pubg, can edit in 4k, run 100+ tracks in Cubase, and run 3 different OSes or as many vms as you'd like [which i think can also run bare metal vm on the 144 firmware upgrade]. on top of that the case still looks good and I've kept at least 50+lbs of ewaste out of landfills or whatever... seems pretty worth it [hopefully no one ever tries to steal pictures of my cats] [we could also get into a discussion about the right to repair bill in the EU, talking this way] do you game? i feel like that might have been intentionally left out of the interview? what info would you keep unencrypted on your servers? how much does a colo cost for a 2u server typically? how about back in 06? is rsync a good solution for video files backup? what are the benefits over say, running a home server and keeping physical backups at your friends house or iron mountain or something? can rsync use 'live' encrypted data? in other words, how do you encrypt/decrypt on the fly? say for streaming an mp3 or something? [not that you would do this if you were paying per GB...] please excuse my ignorance. I'm not a real sys admin, just an old wanna be hacker that could never get his shit together.

Rebelgecko 6y ago

For many versions of MacOS you can just edit a plist file to get it to install on unsupported hardware. When I've done this there were no stability or performance issues, but YMMV depending on what OS and hardware versions you try.

Sunspark 6y ago

Browsers have put in patches for Spectre. I turned off Spectre and Meltdown in my OS because I wasn't willing to live with the performance hit for a scenario that is unlikely to befall me. I think it's fine if the Mac Pro is using a completely up to date browser and isn't installing new random applications.

bluedino 6y ago

>> I would never browse the internet with a vulnerable OS on a vulnerable processor (spectre etc...) You might be paranoid. I've been browsing on a few 2008/2009 obsolete Macs for a while, on the highest OS that they will run. Eventually they'll be a pain to use because of browser incompatibility, pages will get even more bloated and these machines will run them even slower.

cmckn 6y ago

I have one of the 2008 Mac Pro’s running the k8s control plane at home. Those things just never die.