I have to say and I mean this in a nice way but I think some of this is do to
the original poster’s skills being out of date. Not saying he’s unskilled,
clearly that’s not the case and I’m always down to work with / help another
Unix brother:) but a lot of the comments seemed dated to me. For example, perl
isn’t used nearly as much any more especially in automation.
Like you John I haven’t ever had or even heard of the admin user issue.
There’s nothing that a good ol su hasn’t helped me get around and I spend a
lot of time in the terminal.
I will say that I my self and a big fan of time machine here and
similar backup solutions so it’s not a big deal for me to just whack the data
on the disk and restore if I get to far in the weeds.
Different approaches I guess.
On Jul 15, 2020, at 10:13 PM, John Panarese <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It’s unfortunate that your experience has soured you on upgrading. I have
done plenty of upgrades for clients and myself since Catalina was released
without any issues at all. You are the first person I have ever heard about
who didn’t get an admin account when upgrading. I’ve heard of many funny
things that have happened over the years to users, but nothing that dramatic.
I have had installs while Beta testing go completely south and I have, as a
Beta tester, learned how to deal with any number of oddities or complete
reinstalls that have been necessary over the last fifteen years.
As for Catalina, unfortunately, Martin, this is the world we live in.
Apple has gone the direction of locking down the system to prevent malicious
software and viruses from taking over the system. Windows has been and will
continue to be plagued by this, and I am assuming Apple is trying to stay
ahead of the game by making system folders and resources off limits to just
about anyone. You can, though disable SIP and get access to those folders or
files, and I know of several people that have done this without issues. I’ve
not done it myself as of yet, but you can find info in many places explaining
how to do this and the caveats to doing it.
Do I agree with the tightened security? No, I am an old school guy who
likes to have access to under the hood stuff. However, at this point in my
life as I support clients and deal with the average consumer more and more,
in all honesty, I see why Apple is doing what it is doing. It, unfortunately,
protects the user from him or herself at times. It’s a sad reflection on the
world, but seeing in many instances how a user can be their own worse enemy
and invite trouble onto their system, especially as the level of hackers and
people who mean harm to users grow in their sophistication of carrying out
their desires, I guess Apple has decided to raise the bar in their own system
security.
I’d just do a fresh install of Catalina on a drive and not update from a
previous system and then manually update your data onto the new system disk.
That’s what I get around to doing with every MacOS update in the end and
always did that with Windows as well.
Take Care
John D. Panarese
Director
Mac for the Blind
Tel, (631) 724-4479
Email, john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Website, http://www.macfortheblind.com ;<http://www.macfortheblind.com/>
APPLE CERTIFIED SUPPORT PROFESSIONAL (ACSP)
Apple Certified Trainer (ACT)
Apple Performance Partner
MAC and iOS VOICEOVER TRAINING AND SUPPORT
On Jul 15, 2020, at 5:34 PM, Martin McCormick <martin.m@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:martin.m@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
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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