It turns out that MacOS has its share of annoying quirks that can result in hours of delicious yak shaving. Here are a couple I just wasted time on:
- My bash prompts started showing up as “108:~” Turns out this was due to the Mac’s goofy way of choosing a hostname combined with the fact that when I rebooted my machine I was connected at a TMobile hotspot. Adding
HOSTNAME=my.fully.qualified.host.nameto /etc/hostconfig works around the issue, but it’s not encouraging that that file starts with the comment# This file is going away, and isn’t changed when I update the hostname in my sharing preferences pane. - Spotlight started indexing my remotely-mounted TimeMachine volume, and my attempts to tell it not to by using the Spotlight prefs pane resulted in an unknown error. Eventually I stumbled across
# mdutil -i off /Volumes/TimeMachine # mdutil -E /Volumes/TimeMachine/
, but I’m still not entirely sure that will work. Fingers crossed.