Unmemorable Memories

I’m getting increasingly frustrated with Apple’s Mail.app on OSX. It’s a great mail program but it does have some very annoying bugs. This blog entry will be used as a catalog of the bugs I find with Mail.app.

1. Loses IMAP server connectivity - occasionally a small triangle with an exclamation mark will appear beside some mail boxes. Clicking it will popup a message indicating “the connection to port 993 of the mail server timed out”. Manually connecting to that port on that server from a terminal using telnet works fine, but Mail.app cannot reconnect. The only way to resolve it is to restart Mail.app

2. Cannot delete files sent as attachments - Once you send a file as an attachment, it cannot be deleted without quitting Mail. If the file is on a remote volume mounted from a server, you will not be able to eject the volume until you quit Mail. This can cause problems with the Finder in particular if you are a mobile user and you disconnect from the network where that share is mounted from. Finder can freeze and take long to respond. Work around is quit mail before deleting the file and before ejecting a network volume.

3. Mail.app occasionally loses “sent” emails - I haven’t been able to determine what causes this, or where that lost e-mail goes. The e-mail gets sent, the recipient receives it (I’ve verified this), but the message isn’t in my “outbox” or “On my Mac -> Sent” folder or in the Sent folder on my IMAP server. Yes, I’ve configured Mail.app to store “Sent” messages on the server. This usually works, but in rare occasions, some sent mail does not get stored in the Sent folder.

I have been asked many times by many people the following question: “Is it wrong to do …?”, or “is it right to do …?” I also hear many people say ,”there’s nothing wrong with …” as a defense to something they have done. It’s as if we are trying to draw a fence between right and wrong, and then we try to stay as close to that fence as we can, and if possible we try to push the boundary of that fence farther away to include more and more things and activities that we would like to do. It seems that we are trying to find the minimum requirement that will please our God, and then only trying to accomplish that minimum requirement. We are like a student that is going into an exam with the goal of only making a passing mark. Is this how our relationship with God should be, just accomplishing the bare minimum? On the contrary we are being urged in Matthew 5:48 to be perfect. Our goal shouldn’t simply be to pass the exam, but to gain a perfect score, 100% plus all the extra credit!

Right vs. Wrong? That is not the right question. The question is how close can you get to the ideal of God? Just because an activity is “not wrong” does not make it perfect. If we simply ask ourselves if something is right or wrong, we are short changing ourselves. We are not allowing ourselves to be our best, to achieve that perfection that God so desires. Instead, the question that we need to ask ourselves is whether or not our actions, thoughts or words will more accurately reflect Christ.

“… our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not… we are not going to serve your gods…” - Daniel 3:17-18.

Are we able to utter such a prayer? Do we really believe that God will deliver us? And are we able to maintain our integrity and faith even if God does not deliver us? Are there times when we let our integrity slip just for the sake of not being singled out as “weird” or “different”? Are there times when we conform to the ways of the world just to accommodate our friends and families?

Going into surgery, many people asked me how I felt. Was I afraid? Was I apprehensive? Did I have any anxiety? Did I ever think “what is something goes wrong?” or “what’s recovery going to be like? will it be difficult?”

I can truly say that God has given me peace. The apprehension, anxiety and fear never entered my mind. I never thought anything would go wrong. I never thought that recovery would be difficult. In fact, I expected myself to be up and about a few hours after the surgery. In the last few months, I’ve been noticing God leading me in various ways, slowly making changes in my life, giving me opportunities to share Him with those I come in contact with. And God continued to become more and more real in my life. I began to see that his work in my is not yet complete. He is still converting me, changing me, improving me, and using me. With that thought, how can I think that anything would go wrong on my surgery? God is not finished! He needs to finish his work in and with me. This is the thought that brought me the utmost peace.

And this peace is not without basis. For truly after the surgery, I was walking in a few hours. Pain? It was bearable. Within one day I began o resume all my normal activities (except heavy lifting — as strongly recommended by my surgeon).

Our God is truly our Greatest Physician. Not only does he care about the physical health, he also cares about our mental state.

God be praised.

Have you ever had an LDOM that failed to boot due to some erroneous configuration files in the root file system? Ever wish you could modify the root filesystem of that LDOM without having to boot the LDOM?

Well, you could take the virtual disk and re-assign it to another LDOM, and restarting the LDOM you just re-assigned it to, then access it from there.

For example:

ldm rm-vdisk bootdisk broken_ldom
ldm add-vdisk broken_bootdisk broken_ldom_bootdisk@primary-vds0 working_ldom
ldm stop working_ldom
ldm start working_ldom


Once working_ldom boots, you can run “devfsadm” to create the device links for the new disk. At which point you can mount it and fix whatever you want to fix.

But what if you didn’t have an LDOM that you could restart at this point? What if you didn’t have the resources to create a new temporary LDOM for this purpose?

There is another way but it has limitations. You will only be able to access the first partition on that virtual disk.

If the virtual disk is a zfs volume you can mount it directly as follows:
mount -o rw /dev/zvol/dsk/zpoolname/volname /mountpoint

If the virtual disk is a file, then you can use lofiadm to create a device for it:
lofiadm -a /path/to/vdisk/file
mount -o rw /dev/lofi/1 /mountpoint

I’ve only tested this on volumes that have UFS file systems on it. It may work with other file systems (even ZFS), I just haven’t tried it.

Now if anyone can figure out how to create device files for the other partitions within the volume (by mapping that device file to an offset within the file), then managing every slice in a virtual disk file or volume would be possible and greatly simplified.