Many of you may not have any problems of the kind I refer to so
this is not meant to bash Apple at all but it's what happens when
times change and the suits who make the big corporate decisions go
in a direction which some of us don't want to go.
The first issue was some sort of technical bug that
caused my upgrade to catalina to leave the upgraded system
without even one admin account. That problem was compounded by
the direction in which catalina is going in which the end user
does not have ultimate root power any more.
Yes, that is exactly what I mean. The last 25 years
before I retired, I worked in a unix environment as a systems
engineer, writing automation programs for our group. These
ranged from shell scripts to gcc programs and ultimately to perl
scripts which are faster to turn from a dream to something all of
us can use.
Every system I worked with had various forms of rescue
modes that sometimes let us save the day with a minimum of
unnecessary down time.
In this case, the nice people at Apple Tech Support spent
a lot of time truly trying to help me by suggesting how to make
the machine create a new admin account.
There is, for example, a neat trick that Apple does when
you first boot a system and install the OS. After you have
created your admin account, the OS puts an empty file named
applesetupdone in /var/db. If one removes that file as root, the
next time the system boots, you will get a new admin user setup
in which you can make an admin account for yourself.
They told me about this and it is totally accurate up to
and including Mojave but then things get weird.
With Catalina, one can still invoke single-user-mode and
appear to be root but one has no root privileges if you try to do
any of the things necessary to mount the file system so you can
remove that offending applesetupdone file.
Honestly, I felt like I'd been pranked for hours of
wasted time, both mine and Apple Techsupport's time.
The truth is that is somebody's idea of security and they
purposefully did it.
The only solution was a complete erasure and install from
backups. Yes, over 1 stupid empty file that needed to be removed.
I am sure that if your admin account works, you can
become root and erase that file but if your admin privileges get
lost, you really have no way to get there from here.
There was a file I read during all this fun that
described the direction Apple is going with catalina. Basically
lots more locks.
I will probably enjoy Mojave until it gets too old to be
useful and the MacOS chapter of my life which has been satisfying
up till now will end and I'll work with other platforms that fit
better.
Apple does not want you to be able to roll back an
upgrade but's that's tough cookies as far as I am concerned.
You don't want to know what I had to do to get there but
there was an opportunity and I took it.
Martin
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