Ever experienced high process numbers (20k+) in Finder? That’s probably since some process keeps respawning over and over. Some launchAgents fail to start and launchtcl keeps trying to start them. This is filling your hard disk with logs and keeps your hard disk busy writing, preventing it to spin down.

12-07-12 11:11:25,732 com.apple.launchd: (org.postgresql.postgres[66258]) Exited with code: 1
12-07-12 11:11:25,732 com.apple.launchd: (org.postgresql.postgres) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
12-07-12 11:11:34,034 com.apple.launchd: (com.edb.launchd.postgresql-9.1[66265]) getpwnam("postgres") failed


You should probably fix the error that prevents the agent or daemon to start but thats depending on the kind of agent. In my case I didn’t need the agents that were spawning. I didn’t need a PostgreSQL-server and neither the Wiki-server OS X is providing, coming with all kinds of collab* processes. Please proceed only if you don’t need the agent you are going to remove, permanently!

So, how do you stop these annoying little agents? First determine the process-name. Then lookup the launchctl plist files:

$ sudo launchctl list | grep annoyingAgent


You can unload/remove this plist from launchctl by running:

$ sudo launchctl remove 'com.your.annoying.agent.plist'


Please check now that your computer is still functioning. Do this first, as you can return easily until now. Just replace the ‘remove’ with ‘load -w’ to re-add the agent.

When you reboot your machine the processes are sometimes coming back and to permanently disable them run:

$ locate 'com.your.annoying.agent.plist' | while read -r line; do sudo mv $line $line.disabled; done;


Last year I published my Ultimate Single Sign On tool for setting up a perfect Home Server. The work on this project is not yet done and I can use all the help you guys can offer me. Setup is easy: just use VirtualBox, Ubuntu Server and install after a git clone of git://github.com/hermanbanken/Ultimate-Single-Sign-On-Enviroment-Installer.git.

When you have this (or your own working LDAP server) up and running your users can login on Mac OS X and Ubuntu and can use their home directories and stuff. But they can’t change their credentials and user info, till now..

LDAP Control is a control centre for your Home Server where your users can manage their data (feature #2) but can also start and plan backups (feature #1), browse your families Address Book (feature #3), manage your favorite series and movies through the media centre (feature 4), and much more (when you guys help me).
Read more »

In the last few months this blog started to generate a lot more traffic than before. Mostly via the tweets from my fellow student (@veeence) but my site also gained a few returning visitors interested in the Mac server scene. As these folks started to test my scripts posted here they found found some bugs and posted some comments. One of them is Sean and today I’m announcing Sean as a new writer for this site.

Sean will mostly write about Mac server imitation implementations, complete with Single Sign On and Windows support. But of course he can write about whatever he wants if it’s only a little bit relavant for you guys!

So stay tuned and if you like the blog, subscribe for the RSS feed!

Update 13/01/13: run WhatsApp on your pc/mac without a phone/VNC!

WhatsApp is a fairly new App for multiple mobile devices. Due to the App Store, Android Market, etc. it grew huge in just a few months. Especially since people started to use them as a replacement for SMS chats and because your identity is based on your mobile number.

I think WhatsApp as a service has one disadvantage: it only works on mobile devices. Although it might be the reason it so popular. At the moment it’s a replacement for SMS and services that offer equal features like Google Talk work on multiple devices. So the service is not thought of as some kind of replacement for SMS. The nice thing is that every one who has WhatsApp has a smartphone and therefore can also download Google Talk apps should WhatsApp become less popular.

The nice thing of a full scale qwerty keyboard is that you can type way faster and therefore communicate faster. So the other day I was having a conversation on WhatsApp and messages where being send almost faster than they could be read. In order to keep up with the chat I really needed a full size keyboard. Then I came up with the following idea: install a VNC server on my iPhone and connect to it from my mac!

So here is the manual to do so:

1. Jailbreak iPhone
2. Install Veency
3. Install VNC client on mac like “Chicken of VNC” or “JollysFastVNC“.
4. Connect to your iPhone

Until somebody decides to write a app that can use WhatsApp as a server – I might get that idea in my head and end up writing it myself, so stay tuned – we’ll have to use this epic work-around or continue using our phones keyboard..