10 ms·
Sonoma's log gets briefer and more secretive
- habitue 3y agoI have to think that if you want this level of insight and control over your system, you're going to be less frustrated by not using MacOS at all and switching to Linux or a BSD. Macs are appliances, like a fridge. When your fridge breaks, you don't look at the logs and try to diagnose it yourself, you take it to a repair shop. Apple has been pretty clear they really don't want you poking around on their systems.
- herpdyderp 3y agoI’ve been debugging and fixing my Macs on my own (well, with internet help of course) for 20 years. They’re still more flexible than windows imo.
- willdr 3y agoMore flexible than Windows isn't exactly a compliment.
- hackmiester 3y agoSeriously - this dichotomy is absurd. My workplace has been RHEL for 20 years and has quietly side stepped all of this nonsense. Yes, even after the acquisition.
- jftuga 3y agoWhat laptops do they issue out to engineers? What issues do you run across?
- skydhash 3y agoThe way I use my laptop (plugged and always attached to a monitor, keyboard and external mouse), a desktop would be the most appropriate choice. And no, I don't want to work at coffee shop and a smaller, lighter, cheaper laptop could do if I wanted to be mobile around the house (WFH).
- hackmiester 3y agoWe run Dell Latitude, Precision, and sometimes XPS (though I hate those). Pretty much no issues. Dell would rather us run Ubuntu it seems, but it's close enough that RHEL tends to work fine.
- jabbany 3y agoCan you get macos to stop dropping .ds_stores all over the place? (I really do want to know) Because you can get Windows to never drop thumbs.dbs without much hassle.
- gabeio 3y ago> Can you get macos to stop dropping .ds_stores all over the place? (I really do want to know) You can prevent it from dropping them on network drives (SMB stores): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208209 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208209
- jabbany 3y agoI know about this. Unfortunately it is in no way sufficient. I want it to stop dropping these _anywhere_, and I'd be more than happy to give up thumbnail functionality for this. However, afaik the "easiest" way to do this is apparently to bind a hook to listen to all file system writes by everything and then sweep up the junk whenever it is detected...
- sillysaurusx 3y agoHaha. The only way I found was to mount a read only file system. The ds store has to be one of the silliest design decisions. But say la vee.
- keyle 3y ago"C'est la vie"
- makeitdouble 3y agoThat's definitely an aspect that got worse during these 20 years though, and Apple has no incentives to reverse the trend. If anything, there C* suite explicitly advocates for a more iOS like model all across the board. Parent's comparison point was linux, but I'd argue current macos isn't that far from current windows.
- mpalmer 3y agoPity the IT teams who are forced to administer these circumspect fridges because employees won't use Linux.
- jasonjayr 3y ago"Continuing to use the apple fridges requires a subscription to applecare to fix and diagnose any problems we previously could fix, the TCO of this hardware is now higher...."
- dangus 3y agoThis is hilarious. The idea that the typical IT admin wishes that Linda in Marketing would use Linux is so divorced from reality. IT just wants a fleet of systems that are easy to automatically deploy, patch, and restrict dangerous actions on. The easier they are for the lowest common denominator employee to use, the fewer tickets get opened. The idea that your IT team will ever waste their time crawling through your local system logs is unrealistic. I’m not saying the log shouldn’t be there or shouldn’t function properly, I just think that macOS being commercial and popular makes it very easy to administer compared to a Linux desktop. You just buy off the shelf products like Jamf and click a few buttons and that’s about it, voila, you have a managed fleet. The architectural elegance of the system is secondary to the amount of labor cost it saves. You can even order a computer directly from Apple shipped to your employee’s house and have it zero touch provisioned. I’d love to see a Linux laptop with that capability (really, I would love to see it).
- mberning 3y agoNot sure why you are downvoted, because this is spot on. You can tell many people on HN nave never worked in an enterprise environment. As a developer I would love to have a Linux laptop, but a Mac is as close as I can get. Companies do not have the resources or wherewithal to manage and secure 3 or more disparate desktop platforms.
- pknomad 3y agoI worked as a CPE before moving onto SRE and this is spot on. Jamf and others like Kandji are excellent tools for deploying, configuring, and erasing the device at scale and same thing for InTune for windows. There’s no equivalent for Linuxes other than agent based CMs like Puppet or Chef and those tools don’t deliver the same features as the tools that are offered for windows and macOS.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NewJazz 3y agoWhen your fridge breaks, you don't look at the logs and try to diagnose it yourself, you take it to a repair shop. Well... Won't the repair person want to look at the logs??
- tomxor 3y agoNo they just check the "water damage" sensors regardless of the problem and then tell you the price of changing the bottom bit, the top bit, and the price of a new machine, which are conveniently all the same price. [edit] Aha, touched a predictably sore Apple spot there I see.
- user3939382 3y ago> their systems It’s my system.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- walteweiss 3y agoIt’s yours only when it’s a free system, you know. Otherwise it’s precisely their system.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cjensen 3y agoMy last fridge literally had the ability to press some buttons to get error information as an encoded sound. An app is used to decode the audio to obtain something that can be read. Sadly it was a break in a component that cannot be swapped out. I've fixed appliances, and the best source of information about what is wrong is usually the microcontroller. Sometimes it's just a hex error code, and that's enough. A firehose of text like MacOS currently produces is unusable.
- mdekkers 3y ago> Apple has been pretty clear they really don't want you poking around on their systems. Sorry, _Who’s_ system? Apple can do with their systems whatever they want, but mine is mine, not Apple’s
- Condition1952 3y agoit’s not yours, it’s granted to you under a license
- walteweiss 3y agoOh, I find it beautiful that it’s ‘their system.’ When on a free system like Linux, *BSDs it’s your system.
- aequitas 3y ago> When your fridge breaks, you don't look at the logs and try to diagnose it yourself, you take it to a repair shop. I for one welcome the ability to troubleshoot and fix the devices I’m using. Unless it’s still in warranty (but maybe even then) I do want to look at logs or diagnose the problems. Order the replacement part online and have it running again. There’s no reason I must rely on someone else to do something I could and should be able to do myself.
- duped 3y agoSome people can and do fix their own appliances, so that's a terrible analogy
- dangus 3y agoGiven that Apple already had a way to unhide the private info, and that we are on the .0 release, this could just be a bug. It could be a new thing going in the log that isn’t working right. Also, I can see why ShareKit has potential to contain very private info. I don’t know that I’d love for my computer to save a list of share sheet activity in plain text. > If you used Macs before Sierra, chances are that you were happy to browse their logs when necessary Citation needed, I say chances are 99% of Mac owners have never opened system logs.
- throwaway290 3y ago> chances are 99% of Mac owners have never opened system logs. Because on a Mac it's not necessary in 99% cases
- ranger207 3y agoYeah this is the Apple philosophy in a nutshell: it works >99% of the time, when it doesn't work you're holding it wrong
- zappb 3y agoPretty sure this is privacy related. Just enable more verbose logging to see all your personal details in said logs again.
- lapcat 3y ago> Pretty sure this is privacy related. Under the section heading "Privacy", the author wrote: "Censorship to maintain privacy is an important feature in the Unified log, and is responsible for so many of its entries being peppered with <private> instead of revealing potentially sensitive data." So yes, this is privacy-related. > Just enable more verbose logging to see all your personal details in said logs again. From the article: "Apple has now decided that some log content is too private to reveal even when privacy has been removed. I came across this recently..." "Of course, it may be possible to turn this additional privacy off, but the documentation leads us once again to a guessing game."
- bastawhiz 3y ago> Apple has now decided that some log content is too private to reveal even when privacy has been removed. I came across this recently... If this is true then why is it being logged in the first place? Logs probably aren't the right way to expose that data.
- saagarjha 3y agoThere are surely ways to make those show up as well.
- bastawhiz 3y agoBut you shouldn't! Could you log your DB creds to your error logs for debugging? Sure! But they shouldn't go there! If you need to check them, use the mechanism for accessing creds.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y agoIt's better to have one place to look for diagnostic information. This sort of just-in-time masking seems optimal to me.
- e28eta 3y agoThe log censorship _has_ to be because sketchy / malicious apps are reading private data from the log. And it seems pretty obvious that the greater good is achieved by blocking that personal data. As a user, I certainly wish there was a logging level / filter / setting of “things that are broken that you can do something about”, along with the ability to dig into the underlying trace data that helps you better understand details about the problem. But I think it’s pretty clear to everyone that’s not the user that Apple is solving for. Even if you did have a clear bug & root cause, good luck getting it acknowledged & fixed through their public-facing bug tracker.
- lapcat 3y ago> The log censorship _has_ to be because sketchy / malicious apps are reading private data from the log. No, they aren't: "Currently, the only way to see unmasked log entries is through a special profile."
- zshrc 3y agoThese profiles are provided by Apple for the explicit use of debugging... what makes you think bad faith actors wouldn't take advantage of harvesting such juicy data? Especially at the verbose rate macOS provides...
- lapcat 3y ago(1) Very few Mac users have installed the private log debugging profile. (2) The number of Mac users who have both installed the private log debugging profile and also installed malware without knowing it is vanishingly small. (3) People mostly use the profile temporarily and then uninstall it, so even in the vanishingly small number of cases, the window of opportunity is a lot smaller. It would be a lot of effort for no return. Bad faith actors are looking for easy, plentiful targets. Expert users who comb the logs are the opposite of that. In fact, it's a great deal of effort to find useful information in the logs even for good faith actors looking at their own machines, because of the loquaciousness of the OS.
- xp84 3y agoThe big issue which the author mentioned, where Macs now spew logs at a rate of thousands of messages per second is the real WTF. I don’t even have a problem with verbosity per se, the Mac logs are not only informing of events that have a severity level of debug (such as “Woke from sleep due to network” or info, such as “Display #1 was disconnected” - they’re brimming with literal errors. It’s as though a few years ago they decided to simply give up on having a stable OS which at least functioned correctly, even on a clean install at idle. The logs make clear that most components are full of uncaught exceptions that apparently they don’t even care about. It’s weird that they don’t think this will eventually destabilize the whole system. With that level of neglect among Apples system developers, the logs may as well just be piped to /dev/null anyway, because ain’t nobody got time for digging through that volume of logs to troubleshoot anything. It’s a far cry from 10 years ago, when if you were having something wonky happening, you could go right to Console and find the whole story spelled out for you.
- lazide 3y agoThey’ve always been this way. Eventually the OS will get noticeably shitty, then it will be embarrassing, then they’ll do a cleanup sprint and fix most of them.
- cglong 3y agoIMO, the current dip in quality has been lasting a lot longer than in previous iterations.
- lazide 3y agoAgreed. I blame post-Covid burnout.
- corbezzoli 3y agoPoor developers, making 500k/year working in perfectly safe conditions must be real tough. I don’t think burnout is the reason for the dip in quality, Apple software has been crap for a long time on the Mac.
- eviks 3y agoWhat a waste of a system with a typical no user configuration approach