It is a good idea to change your email password every now & again. In many ways, control of your email account is the key to a lot of other things, such as recovering a ‘forgotten’ website password. So you want to make sure that your email password is not easily guessed either by humans nor machines. You also want to be sure that your email password has not been stolen somehow from the server or any other way.

The topic of passwords themselves is a whole ‘nother article. There are still some people who use the same password for everything, which is a bad idea. Some people say you should make a really complicated password that is difficult to remember. Bleh. A great way to make a new password is to use several words or a sentence that you can easily remember, but is long enough to be difficult for a machine to guess. For example; “Katie goes to school at 8″ . That is a nice  long password, but still easy to remember. Or another idea; “dougsphonenumberis3105551212″. If you already know Doug’s phone number, I bet you have already memorized this one, and yet at 28 characters it is VERY difficult for anyone or any machine to guess.

Let’s change your email password!

The first step will be to visit the email server & change it there, then we can go forward & enter the new password into your Apple Mail, and iPhone or iPad.

I’m using DreamHost hosting, and so is the SBAMUG. Maybe you are too. We are going to start there by signing in to the server so we can officially change to a new password. This must be the first step. The server needs to know about it first. If I am doing your web hosting,  the link to change your email password may be http://mailboxes.yourdomain.com  you can give that a try & see.

http://mailboxes.SBAMUG.com

After we successfully sign in, we can change to a new password. Enter it twice, then click “Change it” to save.

Ok! That’s it! the new password is set! It may take a few minutes before your email app notices & complains that the old password doesn’t work anymore, but let’s go ahead and enter your new password into Apple Mail.

HOW TO ENTER A NEW PASSWORD INTO APPLE MAIL

These screen photos are of Mail for Mac OSX Snow Leopard, and yours will probably be fairly similar.

Start by pulling down the Mail menu to Preferences, and click the toolbar button for “Accounts.” We will start by entering your new email password for the incoming POP or IMAP server.

Not too difficult for you? Good! That part is done!

Next step is to change the password for your Outgoing SMTP server. It is sort of hidden. Click the pop up menu for Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) and choose the very last item on the menu.”Edit SMTP Server List…”.

Click the tab for “Advanced”, and we see the window where we can actually enter the new password.

Click OK to save the changes, close any extra windows, and we’re good to go! Hooray! We win! 

After certain software updates and/or Mac OS X installs your Palm HotSync may broken. You might have had to Force Quit it because it seems completely stuck. Don’t despair! Here is a fix.

* First off, know that Palm HotSync DOES WORK with Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard and 10.6.x Snow Leopard. Yes, this really old software that started life as Claris Organizer before being bought by Palm Inc still works 10 years later in Snow Leopard, and the Palm HotSync too.

If your Palm HotSync software tries to launch, bounces in the dock, but is unable to get farther than that, that is the problem we’re talking about here. When I pushed the Sync button on the Palm Centro (or hot sync cradle) the HotSync software in the Mac responded by launching the hotsync manager, which tried, but was unable to launch.

The cure seems to be to remove these 2 files from your home folder;
~/Library/Preferences/Palm Desktop Info
and
~/Library/Preferences/com.palm.HotSync.plist
You can trash them, or if you prefer to be careful, just drag to desktop for now, & trash later.  It will make new copies if it needs to. Actually, I’m not sure if you need you remove both of them or just one, but that will fix it, and no harm done.

You might Reboot, just because that is what I did about that time.

Ok, your Palm Hot Sync ought to be operational again. (YAY!) It should launch without problem, and Sync. Expect this 1st sync to take far longer than usual because it is going to do a “slow sync” meaning that it actually compares each & every record in the address book & calendar.

What is the best Web Browser for an old Mac?

Opera 9.64 is the best you can get… for anyone stuck on a very OLD Mac still running OSX 10.3.9 Panther.

I know that because I had an injury earlier this year that kept me flat on my back for 2 weeks. The challenge was to be productive with nothing more than an iPod Touch & an iBook G3/700, circa 2003. The laptop (which originally shipped with a bootable OS 9)  runs too slow to realistically use with Tiger (osx 10.4) so I erased it & installed Panther OSX 10.3, then amused myself by assembling a collection of useful tools to help me be productive and tools that would run under such an old OS.

FireFox 2.0.0.20 will run in Panther, but useless because it can’t properly display most modern websites. (Just forget about watching YouTube on an old computer). Neither did that old version of Safari, but Opera 9 works pretty well, and includes a decent IMAP email client (pop3 client too, but I was using imap). Supposedly, Opera 10 is rated to work with Panther, but that was not my experience. 9.64 is it. BTW, this is when I seriously gave IMAP a try, and for those of you out there with multiple email devices, it works far better than POP3 mail – but your server needs to allow you enough server space to make imap practical.

Other OLD apps I found useful and worked with OSX 10.3.9 Panther:

Adobe Reader 7.08
ChronoSync 4.05
Comictastic 2.32
Chicken of the VNC 2.0b4
GraphiConverter 5.95
Flash Player 9
MS Office 2004
PDFPen 2.43
SuperDuper 2.1.4
TextWrangler 2.13
Timbuktu 8.6
Transmit 3.66
WakeOnLan 1.0

I used 1Password on the iPodTouch, and since DropBox is not supported on such an old system, ChronoSync can sync a local folder to a network volume that is a dropbox folder on the server. More old Mac apps at;
http://mac.oldapps.com/

Best,
Dave Nathanson
Mac Medix

Sometimes you want to send a plain text email. Perhaps you belong to an email list that requires it, or you are sending to people who are using software that prefers plain text. Perhaps you just want to send smaller, lighter emails twice as fast in a more compatible fashion. Rich Text emails are usually about double the file size of a plain text message, and they *could* include undesirables such as malware, and bad scripts.

Different email software does this differently, so let’s start with Apple Mail.

Apple Mail has some hidden features, including a toggle switch to chose Rich Text or Plain Text. One quick way to make sure your outgoing message is plain text is to pull the Format menu to ‘Make Plain Text’.

If you’d like an even easier way you can modify your Mail toolbar to include a toggle between Rich Text & Plain Text – as circled in the top picture above.  To do this;

Open a new message. Or any unsent outgoing message you can type into.

Right-Click (or control-click) in the toolbar to pop up the contextual menu.

Then drag the “Rich Text/ Plain Text” button into your toolbar, and click “Done. Ok, all set!

The “dimmed” side of this button shows you what your outgoing message is now. The bright, clickable half shows what would happen if you pushed that.

I love 1Password! It is a really great Password manager, and in a recent version they added support for storing all your software serial numbers & registrations. I’ve been using a simple FileMaker Pro database for that, so I want to import all of it into 1Password.

The problem begins when you notice that 1Password can import from a text file, but it can only import a text file into Secure Notes or Logins. Aw really?   Hey, these are software registrations, and they belong in that section. It is easy to import your software registrations into 1Password as “Secure Notes” but that seems wrong, especially with a special “Software” section right next to it.

As it turns out there is a trick, and it sounds more difficult than it really is. I’m going to show you how to import your software serial numbers into 1Password so they go into the right section all at once, from any software that can export to a text file. Then I’ll show you some tricks you can use to get your data smoothly from FileMaker Pro to a text file to import into 1Password.

Begin;
Export your software registrations from the other software as a text file; either CSV (Comma Separated Values) or Tab-delimited. If your data might include commas, then export as tab-delimited, then find/replace the commas with something else, then find/replace the tabs to be commas. I used the awesome & free TextWrangler for Find/Replacing, it was great. I replaced commas with double dots (..) .

Ok, so Export your data, or export & rearrange the columns in Excel so that you have them in this order:
title,version,serial number,registered name,registered email,registered company,publisher,website,support email,purchase date,currency,price,order number,notes

It MUST be comma delimited to import as we need to .
Do NOT allow a space after the commas because that will add a space to the beginning of the next field. If you don’t have all of those fields, it is ok to just have the right number of commas, even if there is nothing between them.

You MUST use Windows line endings. So open the file with TextWrangler and pull the Edit menu to Document Options. Choose Windows (CRLF), & OK.

For FileMaker Pro Users:

If your original data has different fields than needed, or less fields, you can make a new calculated field to concatenate several fields into 1 fmp field for export. In my case I had only 6 Filemaker fields (Title, Version, Registration Number, Number of Users, Date, Notes), but 2 of them (Notes & Number of Users) needed to be combined into the 1Password Notes field. So something like this will work in Filemaker Pro;

Make new calculated field “LicenseKeeperExport” of type “text”. Here’s the formula =

Title &”,”&
Version &”,”&
Registration Number &”,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
DateToText(Date) &”,”&
“,”&
“,”&
“,”&
Notes & If(Number of Users >0, ” | Number of users = ” & Number of Users,”")

Then from FileMaker, export just the 1 field (I called it “LicenseKeeperExport”) that includes all of the above in this order, with commas. It won’t matter if this export is tab-delimited or CSV, because we are only using 1 field per record, so there won’t be any more delimiters added. Only what we defined in that calculated field, and a CR ending each record.

OK! So we’ve exported a text file! Hooray. But we are not done.There is some important formatting or it will not work out. You’ll need to use Windows CRLF line endings as (as explained above).

If your exported data is surrounded by Quotes (“) you want to remove those. Find/Replace the quotes with nothing, starting from top.

Note: depending on your data, you might also need to remove control characters from your data. Also easy. Pull TextWrangler’s Text menu -> Zap Gremlins. You probably only need to zap the control characters, replacing with a bullet.

OK! So that’s the difficult part. Save & close the file. We are finished with FileMaker & TextWrangler.

Let’s Launch 1Password and pull the File Menu to Import.
Choose the file type of LicenseKeeper. Surprise! You might expect to choose CSV or Text file, but that will NOT work – because those don’t allow import into the Software section. Remember? That is why we are doing all this! Apparently LicenseKeeper also uses a text format, but with those differences that we did find/replaces for.

Select your CSV file, and select the Character encoding. Mac Roman worked the best for me, but ascii was mostly pretty good too.

If you get to this next screen where it shows a list of your data in nice columns you’re doing well & it will probably work. Keep going!

Give a quick Shout! Hooray! It worked & we are FINISHED!

Email has gotten out of control. You probably receive a lot of it, and maybe so much that you don’t even want to wade through the mess. So much email that you occasionally miss a message from a friend or relative, leaving it unread amidst the sea of low priority commercial email that may not be spam, but it isn’t your first choice to read either. If only there was a way to easily flag or separate email from people you know versus everything else.

Well if you are using Apple Mail, there is a way to do that!

This trick makes use of “Smart Mailboxes”, which are sort of like a saved search. What we are going to do here is make a new “mailbox” and have it automatically contain only mail from people in your address book. To begin, we open the Apple Address Book application (you’ll find it in your Applications folder) and make a new Smart Group.

We want this Smart Group to always include everybody in your address book, and one way to do that is specify all records that have been updated in the past 20 years. That ought to do it!

* If you wanted to make this smart mailbox only contain messages from close friends & family, you could make Address book group of those instead of the “all cards” group, and use that as your filter.

Click OK, and we are finished with Apple Address Book for now so you may Quit Apple Address Book.

Back to Apple Mail.We are now ready to make a new Smart Mailbox. Pull the”Mailbox” menu to “New Smart Mailbox”.

We want to define the criteria for this Smart Mailbox to contain only messages from senders in our address book, and I went further saying I only wanted messages that are in the Inbox and less than 3 weeks old. You can change this to suit your own needs.

There you have it! Now instead of being overwhelmed by all that mail in your inbox, click & read your mail in this smart mailbox instead. It will be a lot more manageable, and you can peek into your main Inbox when you have time.

Here are some more ideas for Smart Mailboxes:

This was done with Leopard version of Apple Mail that comes with Mac OS X 10.5.x. Also works with other versions of Mail.

PS: If you get a lot of email, you may also be interested in this article I wrote about how to let your email app automatically file your emails into folders for you. http://www.nathanson.org/davesays/2009/07/email-in-box-management/

This deal below has expired.
The deal above is currently available.

There are 11 apps in this bundle deal! The ones I find the most interesting (to me) are:
1Password 3.5.9
Easily manage and access website logins.
1Password is a password manager that uniquely brings you both security and convenience. It is the only program that provides anti-phishing protection and goes beyond password management by adding web form filling and automatic strong password generation. All your confidential information, including passwords, identities, and credit cards, is kept secure in one secure place using a highly encrypted keychain.

1Password fully supports most web browsers, including Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, DEVONagent, Firefox, Flock, Fluid, and NetNewsWire. All browser extensions share the data stored in the keychain which means you never need to manually copy your passwords between browsers or from the password manager to a browser ever again!

1Password has received numerous awards, including 4.5 mice from Macworld magazine, MacLife Editors pick, and was the Pick of Week on MacBreak Weekly.

1Password also has a companion iPhone/iPod touch application available in iTunes App Store. (Which I highly recommend, along with the free DropBox sync)

Learn more…

———–

Parallels 6.0
Run Windows, Linux, and more on your Mac without rebooting. (US English)

Parallels Desktop gives Mac users the ability to run Windows, Linux or any other operating system and their critical applications at the same time as Mac OS X on any Intel-powered iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook or MacBook Pro.

According to performance research conducted by Crimson Consulting Group, Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac performs 22% faster than the nearest Windows-on-Mac competitor in standard productivity testing of Windows 7 64-bit on a MacBook Pro. In addition, it is is up to 300% faster for virtual machine operations than the previous version. For 3D and graphics performance, tested under the industry standard 3Dmark 2006 Professional test suite the new version performs up to 7 times better.

Learn more…

Requirements: Intel-based Mac, Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later.
U.S. English version of Parallels will work on any supported Mac anywhere in the world, but the language/localization for Parallels itself is U.S. English only.

“Parallels Desktop 6 beat VMware Fusion 3.1 in 84% of the general tests we ran.” -MacTech Magazine

——-

Divvy 1.2.3
Create custom workspaces, dividing your screen for efficiency.

Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently “divvy up” your screen into exact portions. With Divvy, it is as simple as calling up the interface, clicking and dragging. When you let go, your window will be resized and moved to the relative position on the screen. If that seems like too much work, you can go ahead and create as many different shortcuts as you’d like that resize and move your windows in exactly the same way. Divvy is designed to be quick, simple and elegant. We want it to stay out of your way as much as possible while providing the most powerful window management available today.

Learn more…

“Divvy is a great tool to keep your Mac windows tidy and organized” -37Signals, used by Jason Fried & Ryan Singer

——-

TechTool Pro 5.0.7
Robust disk utility; bootable DVD image included.

TechTool Pro is a full-featured utility program containing options for testing and repair, maintenance (including disk defragmentation), and data recovery. All it takes is one click of the mouse to perform a comprehensive suite of tests on your computer’s hardware and attached drives. TechTool Pro does it all.

Diagnostic & Repair: SMART test of the Mac’s built-in hard drive to check for impending drive failure, a test of the computer’s available RAM, a check of the disk directories, and much more.

Volume Rebuild: Keeps your hard drives operating at their peak performance.

Optimization: Performs both file and volume optimization. File optimization consolidates each individual file into a contiguous area of the hard drive. Volume optimization consolidates the free space on a hard drive. Optimizing enhances the overall performance of your drives and simplifies the file storage layout.

Data Recovery: Recover data from corrupted drives that don’t mount on the desktop and save the data to another location.

Protection: Track deleted files, monitor the free space on your hard drives, save backups of critical directory data to help with recovery in the event of drive corruption, and to monitor the SMART routines of your hard drives.

Learn more…

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later, DVD drive.

—

And there are MORE!

The Problem Report:

In the Apple Address Book application, the File > Import > Text File… does not work for me. I get the field-mapping dialog and I can match up the fields OK, but then:
+ The OK button doesn’t do anything (that I can tell).
+ Clicking the right arrow to see the first imported record works, but the left arrow is still grayed out. If I keep clicking the right arrow until I reach the last record, the right arrow grays out and the left arrow is enabled and I can back up. When backing up, both arrows are correctly enabled.
+ When browsing through the records, the spinning gear next to the arrows appears and never disappears, even though the next card has been displayed and I can go to the next card.
+ Cancel does work, and seems to be the only thing I can do.

unsolved (and thread closed) at:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2289716
–

The Explanation:

Garbage characters can become part of your text file, especially if that text file is an export from another address book application, and especially if some of the data originated from a previous address book program. In this case, some of the data was well over 10 years old, and had come from a Sharp Wizard, exported to a Mac SE/30, several Macs, a Palm 3, then a few more Palm phones, & NOW Contact (NUTD NC).
Tragically, Apple Address book does not report this corrupt data as the problem, it just gives zero feedback and doesn’t work, leaving the user wondering why.

The Fix:

Open that text file in a plain text word processor, the free TextWrangler is great. (MS Word is NOT better for this.)

Search for odd characters, which may well be in a different color, and some may look like upside-down question marks¿. Those are the likely problems. Other problems may look like the backwards P, ¶ paragraph mark (aka Pilcrow). In this file we are only expecting to see the sideways L as a line ending,  not the pilcrow ¶ . However in some cases, the pilcrow is an acceptable character.

A quick way to replace the bad characters is to pull the “Text” menu to “Zap Gremlins” and let it replace any control characters with a bullet • (option 8). This will not nuke your vertical tabs, which are non-ascii characters. Vertical tabs are what was used when you thought you’d used a return in a database field. Here’s what the “Zap Gremlins” dialog box looks like in TextWrangler.

Then “Save As…”

Ok! NOW your text file WILL import into Apple Address book. Yay. You just needed a “clean” file. Actually, this technique will probably work out well for many different applications.

If you plan to continue using your NOW Contact file (or other source file) and you can spend a little more time now to save some time later, then go ahead & use TextWrangler to “Find” each bullet • (X the box to start at top) and then look up that same record in NOW Contact and fix it at the source. Those bad characters will usually show up in NOW as a hollow square  character. If you fix it at the source, then this problem might really go away forever!

This was done with Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard, but may apply to most/all versions of Apple Address Book to date.

Dave Nathanson
Mac Medix

This deal below is expired. But the deal ABOVE is valid now. If you’re interested, click it for more info.

Click the Banner above for more details, and/or to purchase the bundle!

1. What’s a bundle?
A bundle is a collection of applications packaged together and sold at a substantial discount for a limited-time only. MacUpdate bundles are only available from MUPromo.com.

2. Is there a catch?
Nope, none! You get the same versions of the software as if you paid full price! The same support, update, and upgrade options are available to you as well! No ‘Lite’ versions or anything of the sort.

3. Seriously… no catch? How can this be?
MacUpdate has been serving the Mac community since 1996. We leverage our close developer connections and large reach to sell thousands of bundles in a very short period of time. The sales volume and marketing exposure we deliver makes this attractive to our partners.

About the December 2010 MacUpdate Bundle
1. What version of Mac OS X do I need to use the bundle apps?
Mac OS X 10.4 (Intel/PowerPC): Default Folder X, Art Text, Swift Publisher, Typinator

Mac OS X 10.5 (Intel/PowerPC): 1Password, MacFamilyTree, DEVONthink Personal, Flux, Chronories, Interarchy

2. What languages/localizations do the apps in the bundle support?
1Password: English, French, German, Japanese, Russian
MacFamilyTree: English, German, Danish, French, Chinese, Finnish, Norwegian, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Hungarian
DEVONthink: English, French, German
Flux: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese
Default Folder X: English, French, German, Danish, Japanese, Russian
Art Text: English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese
Swift Publisher: English, German
Chronories: English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Spanish
Interarchy: English
Typinator: English, French, German

3. Do all the applications work with Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”?
Yes, all of the bundled applications are fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.6.

4. I already own some of the apps in the bundle, can I register them to another user?
Yes! On the purchase screen, select the “gift one or more apps to someone else” registration option, and then enter the name(s) and email(s) of the user(s) you would like to register individual apps to.

I use a dual G4/1000 running the Mac OS X Server software to provide TimeMachine services over our home network. There is an external firewire hard drive connected for the network users and their TimeMachine virtual back up disks.

This has been working out pretty well (as far as I knew) until this week when an iMac G4 crashed and was not able to start up again. When I looked at it, the iMac did actually boot up – once. I saw the desktop, saw the icons, and that is when I checked to see when the most recent TimeMachine back up was (last night at 7:42 pm). Because the user of this computer uses Entourage 2004 for her email, and Entourage 2004 keeps all it’s mail and attachments in one huge database glob, and it probably does not get a good backup of that glob unless Entourage was quit/closed during backup, I was concerned that we might not have a good backup. So I pulled the TimeMachine menu to get that started.

And within a minute, the iMac had kernel panic-ed. Oof! That can’t be good. Tried booting from a firewire hard drive, which also kernel panic-ed right away. Could be the internal hard drive is really corrupted, or maybe the computer is toast.

“Oh well” I said stoically, “At least we have hourly TimeMachine Backups!” … Except we apparently didn’t.

Because when I booted up an old G4 eMac with the Leopard installer CD to “Restore System from Backup” it was not able to mount her TimeMachine backup. Something about “operation not supported on socket” which did NOT sound good. Disk Utility was completely unable to fix anything. Even more scary – when I went to the Xserve & looked at the TM Sparsebundle file it was not openable there and the size was reported as 0, ZERO MegaBytes. I also did not like the “date modified” as June was several months ago!

Oh man! This is getting worse all the time!  It is days like this that make me question why I do tech support professionally, much less as a hobby. But otoh it’s not like anyone else around here is going to do any better than I do. But it physically hurts me – pow- right in the lower gut, when things are not working well and I might have to deliver bad news. I really like it when things are working well. Luckily for me, things usually do go well, and I rarely get that painful feeling. (And as it will turn out, the modified date of the sparsebundle file apparently does not get updated by TimeMachine – so that is not to be worried about).

So, I searched the internet for “operation not supported on socket” and “time machine sparsebundle error“. i also tried using “get info” to give myself permmissions to that sparsebundle, but although it seemed like it ought to work, it did not.
The winning answer was a combination of several things I read, plus a couple of necessary additions of my own.

Here is what I did to fix that damaged TimeMachine SparseBundle file, so I could restore it to a different Mac that does work.

Begin by going to the XServe and disabling TimeMachine to prevent it from trying to mount this unmountable volume while I’m working on it. The rest of this also takes place at the Xserve keyboard.

Open Terminal and type;
hdiutil attach -nomount -readwrite /path/to/Louise123456.sparsebundle
(Substitute the path & name of your own sparse bundle of course.)
In my case this did not work. It failed as not being possible.
Tried again as SUDO without success.

Rebooted, (not just logged out/in… Rebooted to release the damaged volume which may have still reported itself as “busy”).

Opened Terminal, login root

While logged in as ROOT, then tried that command again, Hey! Here we go! It returned:
/dev/disk1              Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/disk1s1            Apple_partition_map
/dev/disk2s2 Apple_HFSX

So I now knew the unix name of the disk volume that needs fixing; disk2s2 (the one that is not the partition map nor scheme). Yours may be different.
So now type;
fsck_hfs -rf /dev/disk2s2
(substituting your disk’s unix name at the end there).  R&F are to “Force” the repair on a journaled system, and “Rebuild” whatever is broken.
and expect to wait 5 to 55 minutes for the repairs to take place. (That time over 10bt for a 120gb TM volume). What you’re hoping to see is:
** /dev/rdisk2s2
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
** Detected a case-sensitive catalog.
** Checking Extents Overflow file.
** Checking Catalog file.
** Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
** Rechecking volume.
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
** Detected a case-sensitive catalog.
** Checking Extents Overflow file.
** Checking Catalog file.
blah blah blah…. And then -

** The volume Backup of Louise was repaired successfully.

At this point – if you’re really lucky, you can double-click the sparse bundle file open. But I couldn’t. It gave me that same old dumb error we started with; “operation not supported on socket“. And the stupid thing still said it was zero mb in size. But after seeing that it knew some names of files inside the sparsebundle, I wasn’t fooled.  But I ran the repair command again while I considered what to do next.
fsck_hfs -rf /dev/disk2s2

I logged out of the XServe, and logged in as Root. Some people will be quick to tell you that sudo is a better way, but I tried sudo and it did not work. But logging into the effing machine as root did work. Once logged in as ROOT, I was able to see that this file was 120GB (better than zero!), and simply double-click open that SparseBundle file which opened…. after several minutes. *WHEW*!!!  and HOORAY!!!!  I looked in there, and sure enough, it looks like a TimeMachine back up is supposed to look like.

Ok, so moving forward! I have a spare eMac that wasn’t doing anything important, so it is going to be her replacement Mac for now. I booted it up from the Leopard install DVD, (actually an external fw drive with a SuperDuper clone of that Leopard installer dvd – runs faster), selected my favorite language, and
Pulled the “Utilities” menu to “Restore from Backup“.
It asked what backup I want to restore from, and
I choose the Xserve volume, providing the username and password.
After several minutes of “checking” it finally comes back with the correct name of her backup volume (another good sign!) After informing me that this operation will completely erase whatever drive I select in the next step, I select the eMac’s internal HD as the destination and proceed.

As I write this, the replacement eMac reports that the “System Restore” with all user data will be finished in 19 hours or less. Wonderful. Everybody is going to be happy.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a network is only as fast as its slowest hub. So that is wired 10baseT speeds. I’ll be sleeping while the computers are working tonight!

Epilogue:

The Restore from Time Machine Backup went just fine, working from 10pm Sunday evening to 3pm Monday afternoon. So it guessed 22 hours, and only took 20. This on an eMac 1.42Ghz 1.5 Gb ram, over 10bt wired Ethernet, getting it from the firewire400 external hard drive attached to a Dual G4/1000 Tower running Leopard Server & TimeMachine services.  When the eMac was restarted, everything was just as expected, even Entourage is ok.  *Whew*  and double *whew*!    What a relief. Btw, her sparsebundle file on the server never did update its modified date, and I guess it never will.

At some point I’ll take apart the errant iMac G4 and see if replacing its hard drive makes is useful again. I will also be putting a larger hard drive into service as the network TimeMachine Server. Moving a TimeMachine backup to a new hard drive is another article – (hint: Turn off TM, then use DiskUtility to “Restore” the old hd to the new hd, disconnect the old TM drive, and enable TM). Link