And They Said the Mac Was Intuitive
Well, it definitely isn’t in one regard. I was able to delete my usr (Unix) folder. Yes, my usr folder. How did this happen? Well, one of the programs I installed caused this lovely little Unix hidden folder to become exposed. Knowing that I already have a Users folder and the multiple Library folder(s), it seemed reasonable to delete it.
WRONG.
Okay, first let’s try to figure out why this folder was exposed. I have a Maxtor Fusion NAS to store photos, music, data, etc. for both laptops on the home network. The Fusion has a built-in Web server to share data with external users. The Fusion requires a dynamic DNS. I use NO-IP.com to manage this for me (and because it is free).
The NO-IP.com Mac client is great in managing the dynamic DNS. Further, the NO-IP.com folks are great for support. Unfortunately, it seems that this little app is the culprit in exposing my usr folder (bug filed—received a reply—didn’t solve problem).
So, what happened? Well, yesterday I wanted to clean up my Mac by removing apps and using Cocktail to clean up caches and such. While perusing my hard disk, I saw this folder and thought, “I don’t need this” (as mentioned above). Wrong thought indeed.
This caused some very unexpected results. Once the Finder began to delete the folder, the machine locked up and my apps began to self-terminate. I forced a reboot by powering down and then powering up the Mac again, which resulted in the spinning cursor of death.
I then called my close friend Phil who manages Mac IT support at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, CA. Well, he confirmed the situation (including my limited knowledge) and provided the recommendation on how to get my system restored. Within four hours and after reinstalling the OS, life was normalized.
What did I learn? The usr folder is a UNIX folder that should not be made visible. And yet, mine was visible (and with the reinstall of NO-IP’s client, it is again made visible). Further, this is a highly critical folder containing key information about the OS.
Was this folder mentioned in the Mac documentation? Nope. Was this folder name something easily discovered online? Reasonably so, although I didn’t think to go looking until after the debacle.
Imagine if I was a novice user...yikes! Support calls, yelling, crying, and more. Woohoo! What a party. I still consider myself to be relatively new to the Mac, although I do have familiarity from yore. Nevertheless, this is not the intuitive and simple way Macs should work.
OS X’s underlying architecture provides amazing power given that it is based in Unix. However, do Mom & Pop care about this? Nope. Do they care that it just works? Yup. Do they care what the usr folder is? Nope. Do they even want to know about it? Nope. You get the picture.
For those who know much more than I, enjoy the laugh at my expense. For those who know less, beware of your own mistakes. You can still cripple a Macintosh computer.
Lastly…
Anyone out there know how to fix the permissions on my usr folder so I can hide it again? And yes, I did repair permissions using Disk Utility (as well as Cocktail).
M
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I can’t imagine that a “Imagine if I was a novice user...yikes!” is willingly authenticating to destroy the /usr folder even when inadvertently made visible by Coctail and doesn’t have a CLUE how or what is inside said directory.
To title it as such and placing the said moronic moves on OSX’s unintuitiveness and how Apple should have warnings on their documentation is utter STUPIDITY.
I like Matthew’s later convictions and repentance but Matt, as a generous advice for the future, please think of a funny creative title next time. It works with the other superauthors here at AppleMatters (Chris H. and Chris S. are perfect examples).
I thus welcome you to the Apple jungle. Just look out for yourself, next time..
re post 104, WAWA.
I didn’t read this at the time, but have just done so. Matthew, please don’t be put off writing your column, please also consider that when I read the following paragraph, my instant reaction was along the lines of “hey don’t worry, you had good career reasons to do what you did and you’ve found your way back now *wink wink* eh?”.
I was working for Microsoft (I joined the firm in late 1994) and no longer needed a personal computer as I had a work computer available to me. Further, I was drinking the Kool-aid and really delved into using Windows. I know, I was a sell-out to all of my close friends (and the Mac community).
Tone really matters. A very sensitive series of tubes, the internets are.
Now that we know you are not really a Mac or Unix super user so stop playing su or sudo in the terminal. It can get a knowledgeable novice in deep trouble.
That said, I agree with Ben #107. Don’t take these personal attacks too personal and “tone” does matter. It happens to all of us even these condescending A.M. bypassers.
In my case, I was not attacking you personally. I was attacking your notion that somehow destroying your Unix system folder is Apple’s fault. You should have known better than make a childish accusation than that.
In any case, I am sure you have lots to share the Mac community with your tenure on the other side of the force.
Now that you are back on the Mac mothership, try to do more Windows vs OSX kind of columns. It is always a good idea to stay in the center and not lean on neither side of the debate. Let the readers share their wits in the rebuttals.
Last but not least, be fun, creative, and open to discussions.
Robo
The worst thing about this whole incident and discussion, to me, is the vitriol with which some in our Mac community chose to answer! What is the purpose of that, to make ourselves mean and ugly just because the Internet is somehow anonymous? As for what Apple or Windows for that matter could do better, there’s always room for improvement.
The Mac requires a new user to set up the computer in Admin mode - duh, obviously. The printed material that came with every one of my Macs did NOT stress the need to switch to Standard mode immediately thereafter. Perhaps newer machines do come with that instruction?
I’ve thought for years that Apple (Microsoft too) would do everyone a favor with more complete written instructions for the new user. My Apple II came with four detailed, printed manuals - including enough to learn BASIC and machine language programming. I wouldn’t expect that today but think they should include *at least* a printed list showing the file structure, with red stars next to the files needed by the operating system that should never be deleted. Surely this would cost pennies and save more souls than the more computer-savvy realize. You think putting ol’ Mom into standard mode saves her from disaster? Think again. It’s amazing what lack of understanding can do to bollix up a computer system.
It is not Apple’s fault that this incident occurred. It *is* every operating system’s fault to market computers as “intuitive,” “easy to use,” and to advertise over and over again that anyone can just plug it in and go, nothing beyond second grade math and reading required. Both Microsoft and Apple should make it clear that using these machines takes some study and care - and should provide more detailed reading material. About all you receive is a little happy book about all the fun you can have with your new “toy.” That’s a bad approach IMHO.
I agree with ceew. I would appreciate if there was some distinction between fundamental System files and disposable junk. Every now and then I throw away the Quicktime download cache by hand. Cocktail doesn’t seem to bother so I delete this huge files myself. Then there are these useless preferences files, and the ever growing adobe font lists.
Using disk utility gets you nowhere with this, so you’re kind have to trial & error your way trough totally useless and harmless files, and files that are absolutely necessary. Are iDVD themes really application support ? I put them on a different partition and can function from there, same with garage files. Totalling Gigabytes and in my opinion unappropriate files in the library.
Wow, the commenters are assholes. Don’t take them as representative. Remember the battery fires last year? The first wave of reports were met with idiots saying “well duh, there’s nothing wrong with Apple’s perfect laptop, didn’t you read the manual? obviously it’s going to catch fire if you let it sit on carpet for more than a few minutes”. Yeah, right, because flames and explosion are reasonable failure modes. Anyway, it’s the same type of person here. Just ignore ‘em.
You didn’t do anything wrong with either your article or your computer. (I’m a former Apple engineer who’s worked in Powerbooks, CD burning, and CoreOS filesystems. I am speaking with some authority here.)
The /usr folder is supposed to be hidden. No-ip’s software bungled that, as you figured out. If you have the dev tools installed, the quickest way to re-hide it is to run this command in Terminal: “sudo /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /usr”. Since Finder aggressively caches its view of the filesystem, you’ll need to quit and relaunch the Finder to see the effect ... running “killall Finder” in Terminal will achieve that.
You’re not dumb. As your article made perfectly clear with ample humility, you’re just at the natural stage between novice and expert. A novice never would’ve touched that folder out of sheer fear of breaking something. And an expert would have known what it was for. But when you’re in the middle, well, as the saying goes: “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.
In the end, no permanent harm done. You found and reported a good bug, and now you know a little more than before. Good work all around, I’d say.
And just to clarify: I don’t think Apple did anything wrong either.
The mistake was started by the bug in No-IP’s software, and exacerbated by the author. Mac OS X has a number of safeguards in place for this, but he blew past them because he thought he knew what he was doing. It’s a simple case of his mental model differing from reality. Oops. Mistake recovered from, and lesson learned. No big deal.
The main reason Apple isn’t at fault here is that there’s no impenetrable defense against something like that. No series of warning messages can dissuade a semi-expert user who’s convinced himself that what he’s doing is okay.
That behavior isn’t limited to computers, either—people do things like this all the time in other realms: chainsaws, rifles, cars, you name it. Look on the bright side. At least with a computer you won’t wind up in the Darwin Awards!
I know a Mac Technician with 20 years experience who was messing around with Windows and decided to delete Explorer because he was only going to use Firefox. He wrote about it hoping prevent others from going down that road. I thought it was pretty brave to fess up to such a blunder.
Sounds like a trick my brother pulled in the old days, DOS ... saw a program called “wipedisk.exe” and wondered what that would do, ran it to find out ...
When I do a cmd-F on this page I don’t find the word “muppet” anywhere. This is clearly an oversight and one which I’m now remedying.
But seriously:
Before you delete a folder, open it to see what’s in there.
The sheer volume of stuff in usr/ should have been a bit of a giveaway. They would have included some files with very hairy-looking names, quite a lot of files called applesomethingorother, and modification dates corresponding to the day your OS was installed - or earlier.
The other day I used some expert tool (I think it’s called a “wheel wrench") to remove my car’s wheels. Lo and behold, just behind them I found these hidden things called ‘brakes’. I didn’t know what they were for, not being much of a car nut, so I thought it seemed reasonable to remove them.
Later that day I found my car wouldn’t stop, and I drove straight across a major intersection and had a big, big smash up. I’m writing this from my hospital bed - I’m lucky to be alive!!
And they sell cars to ordinary people without engineerigng skills! Are GM mad, or what?
The point is, the Mac is not as intuitive as it was with OS/9. Building a layered system on top of Unix means you will get exposed to Unix from time to time. Usually when you don’t expect it.
Blaming the user for removing a directory that took 4 hours to recover from, well, that can happen with ANY Unix system. It’s why we depend on multiple user accounts with different priviledges, “hidden files” are a Mac Finder thing that are a form of “security through obscurity”, not the best practice anyway.
Apple does its best to provide training wheels, but not everything works 100% of the time. User accounts should not have admin priviledges by default. And applications (pay attention here, Adobe and Yahoo) should not require ROOT/Admin priviledges to be installed on a Unix system designed for end-users. If I want to run Yahoo Messengers, that’s a pretty basic browser style app, no priviledged ports are needed, so no admin priviledges should be needed to install into my home directory.
More people have multiple computers, and vendors aren’t doing adequate testing with ACTUAL platforms their customers use (considering all the “use cases”, as some would say).
Whether the /usr directory is “hidden” or not, it shouldn’t be able to be deleted casually, even by a determined user. Files in /usr should be marked as read-only, and if the NAS appliance doesn’t support or honor file permissions, it fails some pretty fundamental tests.
I have 26 years experience w/ Unix, 23 with Macs. I use OS X every day, and I still run into “issues” from time to time. But I’m generally happy that I have a Unix platform with the Applications that I need to run.
My other machines run Linux, and it’s not always perfect, but it keeps my mother happy that she can e-mail and browse the web without having to be a Windows system administrator. She doesn’t like to monkey around with any computer stuff, and the last thing I want to do is come home to manage yet another Windows system.
There are lots of things that Apple allows users to do that shouldn’t be allowed, like renaming your Home Directory, and this, Apple could make it more difficult to delete essential components of the OS like this by requiring root privileges to change them. Otherwise there is the immutable bit, as was mentioned by a previous poster.
Hopefully by now you’ve seriously asked yourself why it “seemed reasonable” to delete the /usr folder without seeking to understand its purpose. Seems to me there’s deeper insight and long-term benefit to gain by answering that question than being overly concerned about how it was deleted.
Anyone who doesn’t understand and learn why they’re making mistakes (based on flawed logic and other reasons) is bound to repeat them. During my sysadmin career it’s been frustrating to work with so-called “professionals” who’ve remained stubbornly oblivious to that, especially if they’re playing the blame game. It’s always more comfortable working with someone who realizes and is openly honest about their capabilities and limitations.
And there’s no shame in having and using safety nets for computing activities.
your idiocy is matched only by your shamelessness. to impute your ill-advised tinkering to a “non-intuitive os” is a near-exact analogue to the assertion that “all fords are bad because i decided to drive mine into a tree.”