Bartending: Memoirs of an Apple Genius by Stephen Hackett

Author:Stephen Hackett [Hackett, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: vl-nfcompvg
Amazon: B007RPJMFK
Published: 2012-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

"He's Spying On Me"

All Mac power users should be familiar with the Activity Monitor. It's an invaluable tool for troubleshooting Mac OS X.

In addition to applications being run by users (like Keynote or iCal) Activity Monitor can also be used to see software processes being run by OS X itself. These usually have unusual names, like "launchd," "kernel_task," or "SyncServicesAgent."

One called WindowServer usually catches the eyes of novice users simply because of its name, even though it's completely unrelated to Microsoft's operating system. WindowServer is the process OS X uses to draw the user interface on the screen. Force quitting it will immediately log the user out of the computer.

Our Genius Bar had a repeat customer who knew just enough about Activity Monitor to launch it and be confused by it. She was a middle-aged divorcée who owned an iMac G5.

I had no idea what her ex-husband was like, but I assume from my interactions with her the situation between them was far from good.

She was a nice enough lady, but she was easily spooked. Every few months, she found something new in Activity Monitor and she'd come to the Bar worried. She turned off her computer at night, and unplugged her router when she wasn't home.

"He's spying on me," she would say, sliding printed-out screenshots of Activity Monitor across the Bar to me.

"He uses Windows," she would explain, pointing to WindowServer. "He's really smart, and he's hacked in to my Mac! Here's the proof!"

It was impossible to reason with her. This woman was not willing (or able) to hear my explanations for what she was seeing.

She wasn't the only paranoid customer I saw come in to the Store. One guy in his mid-30's would often come in with his PowerBook opened to Activity Monitor, worried about everything he saw being run by the "root" user.

On Unix-based systems like OS X, as you may know, the root user is used by the OS itself to run processes and services that are available to all logged-in users. For example, one of Time Machine's processes is named backupd. Since Time Machine runs no matter which user is logged in, it is handled by the Root user.

Since they're mostly obscure background tasks, most of the names of processes being run by the root user are difficult to read -- things like "prl_disp_service" and "syslogd" abound.

None of us could find a simple, clear way to explain it to this customer, and even if someone had, he wouldn't have believed it.

"I've got a virus," he insisted, pointing to some cryptic process name in Activity Monitor that he didn't understand.

"No, you don't," I replied, trying my best to explain to him what the process actually did. "There are no known viruses for Mac OS X," I continued. "I'll give you my next pay check if I can't find what these processes are in Apple's Knowledge Base."

That didn't go over very well. He asked to speak to my manager.

"I run the Bar," I snapped. "No one here knows better than I do.

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