The little things

Well, games work on that laptop from my previous post. A fresh install from a Windows 7 SP1 disk did the trick.

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I had a small crash course in OSX this morning. I was trying to disable Bonjour, Apple's zeroconf implementation. Past experience has only been on Windows machines and each time resulted in flooding my network with enough traffic to cripple it. Now, OSX wasn't doing that, but I wanted to make the OS a little quieter on the network and I don't really need Bonjour trying to discover devices that I don't want to connect to (it really fills up the sidebar in Finder).

So, I followed this tutorial on how to disable Bonjour's function on mDNSResponder. Well, mostly. I wound up using Xcode to edit the plist and had to change permissions in order to have write access. After making the changes, I rebooted the machine and found that it couldn't resolve any hostnames.

In short, taking ownership of the plist completely erased the system permissions instead of preserving them like "Get Info" displayed. Without that permission, the OS failed to load mDNSResponder resulting in the inability to resolve hostnames. Now, I did make a backup, but that backup, because it was made by me using the GUI instead of Terminal, also removed the system permissions. I fixed the permissions by running Disk Utility and repairing permissions. One reboot later and the system was resolving hostnames again. Awesome.

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A local store was having issues with its email yesterday. One account to their mail server was working perfectly fine, but another wasn't. No matter what machine it was on, the email programs used (Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail, XP and 7, respectively) failed to send emails with a 0x800CCC0B error.

Every search result I had kept giving me the same "solution" which didn't work due to the settings I was supposed to change already being what the solution said they should be. I compared both email accounts and, surprise, they were the same except for account name, password, and whether or not to leave a copy of messages on the server. So, after 45minutes of fiddling with settings, I decided to use Wireshark to look at what happened when the error occurred.

Fortunately, some of the packets were plaintext. From those I could read, authentication worked, but verification failed. Why did verification fail? The mailbox was full, quota exceeded. That was it. There was a checkbox for deleting emails on the server when deleted from the client, but, by default, it was not checked. I checked the option, emptied the Deleted Items folder and the email account started sending emails again.

Therefore, if you want to leave a copy of messages on an email server make sure you check "delete from server when deleted from client" or whatever equivalent setting your email client has. That, or make sure you have no quota on the server.

The annoying part about this was how the email clients did not say the mailbox was full. They just kept spouting "Unknown error!" They also sent deleted Outgoing emails...so some guy got duplicate messages.