{"id":5866,"date":"2015-10-07T12:50:30","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T11:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=5866"},"modified":"2015-10-07T12:58:33","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T11:58:33","slug":"be-wary-of-being-an-early-adopter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=5866","title":{"rendered":"Be Wary of being an Early Adopter"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a guest article written by friend, ex-colleague and keen user of Apple and Dropbox products, Ian Cottam of Manchester University’s IT Services.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Twice recently I have been bitten by being an early adopter of new\u00a0software releases. Of course, I partly do this so colleagues at The\u00a0University of Manchester don’t have to.\u00a0Further, I have three Apple Macs and only update my least used one\u00a0initially.<\/p>\n

The two updates that bit me are: Mac OS X 10.11.0 El Capitan and the new\u00a0Teams feature of Dropbox. My advice is not to use either of these updates\u00a0(yet), unless you really need to. Interestingly, I persevered and have\u00a0stayed with the Teams feature
\nof Dropbox; but have uninstalled OS X El Capitan by reverting to 10.10\u00a0Yosemite from a Time Machine backup.<\/p>\n

Let’s do OS X El Capitan first.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This operating system update experience is the worst\u00a0I can remember, and I have a long memory. What the legions of beta testers\u00a0were doing I cannot imagine. To be fair, I expect many of them reported\u00a0issues to Apple and just assumed Apple would not release to the public at\u00a0large before they were fixed. I know I thought Apple would not release an\u00a0OS that would kernel panic for many users on boot up. How wrong we all\u00a0were.<\/p>\n

A major, low-level change that Apple made for El Capitan was in the area\u00a0of security; that is: kernel extensions, as used by some third party\u00a0applications, have to be digitally signed to be acceptable. So far, so\u00a0sensible. Some examples that I use include: VirtualBox, VMware,\u00a0ncryptedCloud, github.osxfuse and Avatron. To see if you use any third\u00a0party ones too, you can type the following into Terminal:<\/p>\n

kextstat | grep -v com.apple\r\n<\/pre>\n
I expect over time all of the above will be updated to be digitally\u00a0signed. However, at the time of writing some of them are not. Now quite\u00a0why El Capitan does not log such unsigned extensions and ignore them on\u00a0boot up I do not know. Instead you get a kernel panic and your Mac has\u00a0become a brick. Well, not quite a brick as you can boot into safe mode\u00a0(where extensions are not loaded) and try and fix things. But which ones\u00a0are causing the problem?\u00a0Not to mention that I would like to continue working with most, if not\u00a0all, of them.<\/p>\n
Googling shows that VirtualBox before version 5 and possibly nCrypted\u00a0Cloud can ’cause’ the kernel panic; and I have several colleagues who\u00a0persevered with updating to El Capitan by removing VirtualBox 4. I went\u00a0back to Yosemite.\u00a0(The fact that my Time Machine backup wasn’t as up to date as I would have\u00a0liked is\u00a0purely my fault. My other two Macs back up to Time Machine drives\u00a0automatically, but my new Macbook waits for an external USB drive to be\u00a0plugged in. I did try a restore from one of the other Time Machine drives\u00a0that\u00a0was 100% up to-date, but sadly the results were poor – e.g. the display\u00a0driver – and I re-started the process from the specific but slightly out\u00a0of date back-up.)<\/p>\n
If you think that you can get around or live with this issue, I would\u00a0further caution you to Google for Microsoft Office Problems El Capitan, to\u00a0be further shocked. Ditto: Microsoft Outlook 2011 Problems El Capitan, if\u00a0you are, like me,\u00a0an Outlook\/Exchange user.<\/p>\n
I should repeat that some of my colleagues have\u00a0updated\u00a0to El Capitan and have not hit my problems or have worked around them.<\/p>\n
Now on to Dropbox and its new Teams feature.<\/strong><\/p>\n
Teams is Dropbox’s way of bringing some of the advantages of Dropbox for\u00a0Business to Dropbox Basic (the free version with quite limited storage)\u00a0and Dropbox Pro (paid for, giving either 1TB or 2TB storage limits).\u00a0Dropbox’s reason for doing this is so more people will update to Dropbox\u00a0for Business (unlimited storage and greater admin control, etc.).
\nMy first reason for being wary of Teams is that any member of a Team – not\u00a0just the lead – can press the Update to Dropbox for Business button at anytime, committing and converting all in the Team. Now no doubt you can back\u00a0out after a short trial period, but I expect it is a messy business (no\u00a0pun intended).<\/p>\n
What does the Teams feature offer? The first is to create a team or group\u00a0list, such that when sharing appropriate folders you don’t need to list\u00a0everyone in the team every time. Similarly, when a new team member starts,\u00a0and once their email address is added to the group list, they will get\u00a0copies of all all the existing shared folders. Good feature. I created a\u00a0Team with just me in it for initial testing.<\/p>\n
The other feature of Teams – the one I was most interested in – is the\u00a0ability to have separate Work and Personal dropboxes under a single\u00a0account on your Mac, PC or Linux box. If you are coming to Dropbox fresh,\u00a0I would say go ahead and set up this feature, as it’s extremely handy to\u00a0keep work and personal stuff completely separate. However, I had a mixture\u00a0of work and private folders totalling some 120GB: that’s quite a bit to\u00a0separate out. Now you face the decision as to whether the dropbox you\u00a0currently have becomes your business one or your personal one. As I pay\u00a0for Dropbox Pro myself I thought this fairly arbitrary and chose to keep\u00a0my existing account as the business one. Your mileage may vary but I\u00a0discovered I had more personal stuff in my dropbox than business, so the\u00a0other way around might have saved me quite some time.<\/p>\n
Your actual folder is renamed from “Dropbox” to “Dropbox (Your Choice of Business\u00a0Name)”. As many folk have moaned about that, they also create a link to it\u00a0with the old name of “Dropbox”. The next step is to set up, in my case, a\u00a0new personal account (using a different email address) and link it to my\u00a0main one. This is fairly straightforward. It’s also well done how easily\u00a0you switch between your business and personal boxes. If like me, you have\u00a0a 1TB account, that amount is shared between the two, although it is not\u00a0obvious at first and you may get the odd message about the small size of\u00a0your new dropbox, which you can safely ignore.<\/p>\n
The thing that took a long time was copying all the personal stuff from\u00a0what is now my business account to the personal one. You have to use the\u00a0Dropbox desktop client for this. If a given sub-folder is not a share, you\u00a0can try just dragging it over. I realised though that many of mine were\u00a0shared. The only safe, if tedious, route I could find was to add my new\u00a0personal identity to these shares; then transfer ownership – assuming I\u00a0owned the share – and finally after the sync finished, remove my original\u00a0identity from the share, unticking the box that says Keep a Copy. There\u00a0might be an easier way: I hope so. I had a lot of shares to work through,\u00a0and of course you are doing this on just one of the machines you own.<\/p>\n
When done, I set up my second Mac, which was fairly straightforward and\u00a0eventually everything synchronised to the right place. The big issue I had\u00a0was with a third Mac that was further out of step. You guessed it: it was\u00a0the one I had restored to Yosemite as mentioned in the first half of this\u00a0blog. In such circumstances, Dropbox thinks you want to put lots of the\u00a0folders back in to the original and now business identity. You can imagine\u00a0how long that took and took me to unwind it back to how I had it with the\u00a0two other Macs.<\/p>\n
Perhaps I was both unlucky and made a bad choice or two, but be warned:\u00a0for existing users with a complex dropbox setup this is rather painful to\u00a0go through. I’m glad I did, but don’t find it easy to recommend to\u00a0colleagues (yet).<\/p>\n
Dropbox describe Teams here https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/help\/9124<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Be careful out there, and don’t be an early adopter unless you are\u00a0prepared for the pain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a guest article written by friend, ex-colleague and keen user of Apple and Dropbox products, Ian Cottam of Manchester University’s IT Services. Twice recently I have been bitten by being an early adopter of new\u00a0software releases. Of course, I partly do this so colleagues at The\u00a0University of Manchester don’t have to.\u00a0Further, I have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[75,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-guest-posts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-1wC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5866"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5872,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5866\/revisions\/5872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}