July 2008 Archives

As originally posted on TUAW, Stanford's Department of Computer Science
is offering CS 193P this upcoming fall term. The course is titled "iPhone Application Programming."

If you didn't get this in your inbox, here's a new class that's being offered by the Tech Training crew.

Mac OS X 10.5 Support Essentials

Dates: Aug 11-13, 2008
Location: POST classroom in Jordan Quad
Fee: $1,800 STAP funds eligible

Mac OS X Support Essentials is a three-day, hands-on course that provides an in-depth exploration of troubleshooting on Mac OS X. This course is designed to give you a tour of the breadth of functionality of Mac OS X and the best methods for effectively supporting users of Mac OS X systems. The course is a combination of lectures and hands-on case study exercises that provide practical real-world experience.

Who Should Attend:

• Help desk specialists, technical coordinators, service technicians, and others who support Mac users
• Technical support personnel in businesses that use Macs for general productivity or creative design
• Technical coordinators or power users who manage networks of computers running Mac OS X — such as technology specialists who manage classroom networks or computer labs

What You Will Learn

• The troubleshooting process and how to become more efficient with available tools and resources
• Mac OS X v10.5 features in depth, including how to find additional information
• How to prepare for Apple Certified Support Professional certification

So, I'm writing this gigantically long document on FileVault, and I come to the part about passwords, master passwords, and resetting things using the latter.

The way it works is, if your user forgets her account password (the one used for creating the FileVault), anyone with the master password should be able to enter that in Login Window, reset the user's password, which will in turn modify the key used to unlock his FileVault disk image. Except, it wasn't working for me.

Login Window allowed me to enter the master password, but when the forgetful user tried to enter her new password, it would just shake.

Reviewing secure.log, I got a lot of this:

I thought it might have something to do with the Local KDC, or the edu.mit.Kerberos file, but the problem was in the log messages.