First ensure the Mac is set up to be woken over the network: Open the Energy Saver system preferences; Check the “Wake for network access” option. Note this may be in a separate tab, and might be called “Wake for Ethernet Access” or “Wake for Wi-Fi network access,” depending on the configuration of your system.
OS X 10.9 Mavericks Post-Installation Issues This FAQ describes some post-installation issues experienced by the author after upgrading from Apple® OS X® 10.8.5 Mountain Lion to OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks. The upgrade was performed on the author’s Mac Pro (Mid-2010) equipped with a 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, 6 GB of1066 MHz DDR3 RAM, and two internal 1 TB hard disk drives. This FAQ covers the following topics:. Changed settings in System Preferences Installing Mavericks changed some System Preferences I customized under Mountain Lion. After installing Mavericks I recommend you check all settings in System Preferences to assure they are set to your liking. Two post-installation issues I encountered were the result of the Mavericks installation changing preferences I had set before the upgrade:. Persistent prompt for Apple ID when logging in.
After installing Mavericks, logging in to my account resulted in a prompt for my Apple ID, followed by an animation indicating a set up procedure. I traced the source of this problem to iCloud preferences: installing Mavericks enabled the Documents & Data option, which I do not use. Deselecting Documents & Data stopped the prompt for my Apple ID. Unexpected wake events.
My Mac Pro periodically woke up — just the computer, not the display — after installing Mavericks. I realized that installing Mavericks enabled the Wake for network access preference in Energy Saver preferences. Mavericks assumes one is using features related to, which I am not. Deselecting Wake for network access solved this issue. If you want complete control of installing software updates on your Mac, I recommend deselecting the following two settings in App Store preferences:. Install App Updates. Install system data files and security updates.
Mail “Assertion failure” messages in Console After installing Mavericks and opening Mail all messages are'converted.” What happens in this conversion is unknown, but it is a common occurrence with Mail and OS X upgrades. In my case, this conversion had side effects. I regularly archive old e-mail using the following process:.
Create a new Smart Mailbox specifying the criteria for the mail I wish to archive. Archive the contents of the Smart Mailbox — using the Archive Messages feature of Mail — to a mailbox saved in an Archived Mailboxes folder.
Delete the contents of the Smart Mailbox created in step 1. Delete the Smart Mailbox created in step 1. While browsing All Messages in Console, I noted a slew of messages in the following format: Mail368:. Assertion failure.Absolute path passed into.
Pathtoarchivedmailbox These messages implied Mail was looking for the archived mailboxes, indicating something was amiss with the conversion. The solution was to rebuild the Mail index database:. Quit (Command-Q) Mail if open. Open the directory /Library/Mail/V2/MailData. Move the following three files therein to the Trash:. Envelope Index-wal. Envelope Index.
Envelope Index-shm. Open Mail. Mail reloads all e-mail and mailboxes: be patient. When completed, the Message Viewer window opens. You may note some previously-read mail may be now marked new — unread — and you may find some previously-sent draft messages in the Drafts folder.
Empty the Trash. Lost functions in Activity Monitor Activity Monitor, located in /Applications/Utilities, is an important troubleshooting tool. In Mavericks, it lost some useful functions regarding memory and disk usage. The Memory pane replaced the System Memory pane and lost the pie chart displaying memory utilization by type, i.e. Free, Wired, Active, and Inactive.
Similar data is now displayed numerically in tables bookending the new Memory Pressure chart. Likewise, the option to display Memory Usage in the Activity Monitor Dock icon is lost. The pie chart was useful graphic. The Memory Pressure chart may reduce users’ concerns about memory use, but experienced OS X users may miss the pie chart. Nevertheless, memory utilization has changed in Mavericks with the introduction of, making Memory Pressure an easier metric for users to to understand. The Disk Activity and Disk Usage panes have been replaced by a single Disk pane. The Disk pane lacks functions provided by Disk Usage: one cannot choose a specific disk to examine and the pie chart showing disk space — used vs.
Available — is gone. The Disk Usage pane was useful for examining both external drives and non-startup disks installed in desktop Macs, such as pre-2013 Mac Pro computers. One must now open the Info window of a drive or volume for this information. The new Energy pane should prove useful in troubleshooting battery life issues, but may be irrelevant to desktop Mac users. The com.apple.IconServicesAgent process I noticed the com.apple.IconServicesAgent process ( IconServicesAgent henceforth) in Activity Monitor and was concerned by the size of its memory footprint.
Research reveals this process has caused similar concerns in the Mac community for two reasons:. For some users, this process consumes the CPU because a temporary folder used as a cache by IconServicesAgent is missing. Some users found repairing permissions solved the problem, but in most cases the solution is to create the missing folder using the procedure specified in Kieran Healy’s blog post entitled. IconServicesAgent consumes a considerable amount of memory, second only to kerneltask. To understand IconServicesAgent, I searched all available Apple Developer resources, but came away empty handed. My search included:. Mac Developer Library: no joy.
Apple Developer Mailing Lists: IconServicesAgent is mentioned in one topic, but the discussion is unrelated to the performance or memory issues. OS X pages: there is an entry for — a daemon that I have not seen running in Activity Monitor — but the content contains only boilerplate information for a generic man page. I can only conclude that IconServicesAgent is undocumented with respect to Apple Developer resources. Scouring the Web, the best explanation I found for IconServicesAgent is by Graham Perrin. The com.apple.IconServicesAgent code resides in the following directory: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/IconServices.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/ This code has the file extension.xpc, indicating that it is a XPC Service. An XPC Service is “a lightweight helper tool” described in the “Creating XPC Services” chapter of the Apple Developer Document.
After restarting and logging in to my account, there is one instance of IconServicesAgent — the one for my account — using about 100 MB of memory. This jumps up to around 200 MB if I open a folder of aliases to various applications I keep in the Dock.
Memory usage creeps up during the day, leveling off in the low-to-mid 200s MB range. Some users report higher memory usage, others lower. I have yet to see its memory footprint decrease during the day. After running a Time Machine backup, multiple instances — one per user account defined in Users & Groups preferences — appear, despite my account being the only one logged-in.
This must be due to Time Machine backing up the other accounts, i.e. Accessing them with root privileges for the backup. These additional instances seem to persist until I restart the computer; their persistence after a Time Machine backup may be a bug. Until Apple provides Developer documentation, I conclude there is little more we can learn about IconServicesAgent. While the memory usage may be of concern to some, the process appears well-behaved, assuming one has not run into the excessive CPU usage problem caused by the missing folder.
My plan is to observe it casually and not concern myself with its memory footprint unless it increases Memory Pressure. Delay before sleep I normally put my Mac Pro in sleep mode by choosing Sleep in the Apple menu. Under OS X 10.8 and earlier, this resulted in the computer immediately entering sleep mode. After installing Mavericks, a delay of roughly 20 seconds — measured by stopwatch — occurs between choosing Sleep and the computer entering sleep mode. Research again reveals this delay is a common complaint, with many users accepting this behavior as a “feature.” None of the common hardware-related troubleshooting steps for sleep issues, such as or the resolved this issue. I suspect this may be a side-effect of how is implemented in Mavericks. Mavericks maintains daily power management logs that reside in the directory /private/var/log/powermanagement The log file names are in YYYY.MM.DD.asl format, where YYYY is the year, MM the month, and DD the day.
The.asl extension means the logs are in Apple System Logging format. Double-clicking one these log files opens it in Console.
They can also be opened in Console by clicking the disclosure triangle next to /var/log in the Log List, then clicking the disclosure triangle for powermanagement. The log data can also be read in Terminal with the command pmset -g log While my Mac Pro does not support Power Nap, I performed the following experiment: after choosing Sleep from the Apple menu at exactly 22:32 hours — per the menu bar clock — and the computer entering sleep mode after a delay, I then woke the computer and noted the following lines in the daily power management log for 27 April 2014 at 22:32 hours.
Find My Mac, a feature included in Mac OS X Lion, allows users to locate and wipe the data of MacBooks that have gone missing. The disappearance of a device is far and away the most serious digital security and privacy risk that owners of Apple laptops and mobile devices face. With viruses and other malware making only the rarest of appearances, sensitive personal information or valuable company intellectual property is more apt end up in the hands of someone nefarious through the loss or theft of a device itself. If fraud results, an already costly mishap can become painful and expensive indeed.
For quite some time, Apple has given iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad owners a way to mitigate this risk by offering them a free app that can locate a lost or stolen device and, if it can’t be retrieved, wipe it of its contents remotely. Now, with the introduction of its iCloud service, Apple has brought this capability to its computers with a feature called Find My Mac. It’s especially worth activating on a laptop that you often take on the road, since such things are misplaced at an alarming rate — a 2008 study of 106 airports in the United States by research firm Ponemon Institute found that travelers lost more than 12,200 laptops a week — and they may contain enormous amounts of valuable information. The main purpose of iCloud is to make all your content available to you on all your devices by storing it in Apple data centers, where it is accessible to each device.
(Apple provides security for your data by encrypting it while it’s traveling over the Internet and sitting in storage.) But by giving Apple this sort of access to your Mac, a find-and-wipe feature becomes possible. It can locate your Mac when it’s on and connected to the Internet, cause it to play a sound or display a message to whoever found it or lock the machine or erase all of its contents. To take advantage of this feature, you will have to turn it on.
This is simple. Just make sure the box for enabling Find My Mac is checked when you set up iCloud (or you can go to System Preferences, select iCloud and then enable it there). Note that iCloud requires the use of Lion, the latest version of the Mac operating system. And using Find My Mac means you have to allow Apple to access your Mac’s location, something you might not want to do if you (and not just your Mac) are on the run. You may also want to give Apple the power to jolt your Mac from sleep when you want to find or wipe it. Choose this setting by going to System Preferences and clicking iCloud or Energy Saver and checking the box for “wake for network access.” If your laptop goes missing, you simply visit the icloud.com Web site and sign in with your Apple ID and password.
If your Mac is on and online, you will be able to see its location on a Google map. The site will also show you where your iPhone and iPad are if you have installed Find apps on them. Click on the circle with an “i” inside to open a box, and choose it to make a sound go off, display message, lock it or wipe it. It’s the kind of feature you hope you never have to use, but are awfully glad you took the time to set up in that terrible moment when you realize that your laptop has gone missing and may be gone for good.