There is no way of Updating Cached informations. You have to delete the cached User and recreate it.

The Story

The other day we had a problem with an OpenDirectory-User that was working on a mobile account on a laptop running MacOS 10.7. The user got a new laptop and to configure everything for the user we had to change the password to one we knew. So the password was changed in the OpenDirectory. We configured everything and the user changed his password back to a new one.

Everything fine – we thought.

Until the user went back home with his shiny new laptop, opened it up and tried to log in with the new password. the login-dialog shook and denied access. So the user was clever and tried the intermediate password we also knew. And voila – access was granted.

What happened?

The OpenDirectory cached the users password locally. And as we did not change the password on the laptop but on a different machine the laptops cache has not been informed that there is new password information. So the old password was still lurking around there.

The situation was not dramatic, as it was clear, when to use what password, but nice is different.

So what to do?

There seems to be no mechanism to tell the Mac Client that the cached information is no longer valid other than to delete the information. So we had to delete the user while keeping the users homedirectory.

Nothing easier than that. Fire up your terminal and run the following command:

sudo dscl . -remove /Users/[username]

This will remove the user [username] from the userlist but keeps the homedirectory as it is.

Note: You should only do so with a cached mobile user!!!! To find out about your cached users run this snippet:

dscl . -list /Users AuthenticationAuthority | grep LocalCachedUser | awk '{print $1}'

.
This will only output users that are cached. Do not touch other users as long as you do not know exactly what you are doing!!!!

After removing the users entry connect to the network and login as [username]. You will be prompted whether you want to create a mobile user or not. When you select “yes” the user will again be created as cached user. This time with the correct password!

Oh and don’t worry about the homedirectory. Everything stays as it is. The machine realizes that the directory already exists and simply synchronizes the content with the server.

Kudos to infusiontechsolutions.

But for some time now that is not the case any more. Now an Eclipse for the Mac comes as a folder containing the Application (called Eclipse.app) and a lot of other clutter that i’m not interested in. But when I drag the Eclipse.app into my Application folder and try to start it nothing happens (apart from that nice little Error-Message).

I simply accepted that.

Until today.

Solution

Step one

I opened the Eclipse.app-package by right clicking onto it and selecting ‘Open Package’. That opened a new Finder-Window showing a single folder Contents. Go inside!

There we have

• a file Info.plist – don’t touch
• a folder MacOS – we come to that later
• a folder Resources – leave it as it is

The next thing was to move all the clutter from the folder containing the Eclipse.app (except for the Eclipse.app) into this folder Contents.

Now the folder Contents should look somewhat like this:

The content of the folder Eclipse.app/Contents

Step two

Now I had to edit the file MacOS/eclipse.ini

Somewhere there are two lines containing something like

--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.1.101.v20120109-1504

By simply removing two of the three ../ I thought everything was fine. But no.

There also have to be two lines like

-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar

Remove two of the three ../ and be happy. If the line is missing, add it.

So in the End the file should contain four lines like these:

-startup
../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar
--launcher.library
../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.1.101.v20120109-1504

. The exact version-number varies from – well obviously – version to version.

When you are in that file you can also change some Memory values for the Java-VM like the values for -Xms and -Xmx. For more details on that (java heap space memory) ask your favourite search-Engine

That done, you should have a real Mac-Application containing all the stuff needed inside the Eclipse.app.

It doesn’t change anything besides the fact that there is still a lot to learn about PHP.

Cool stuff I thought at once.

Especially simply using the code-direction to obfuscate the mail caught my eye.

But on the second glance, there was one major drawback. Try to bring such an eMail-address to your mail-client by copy and pasting. The nice and shiny address foo@example.com suddenly transforms into an ugly moc.elpmaxe@oof.

But hey, the user wants to click onto the mail-address anyway. So no Problem there. Simply add a mailto-Link to the obfuscated eMail-address and thats it.

Oh, wait! Major drawback there.

• Either I have to use the plaintext eMail-Address – Why go through the hassle of obfuscating the address in the first place?
• Or I need some way of translating the reversed address into a plain one without someone noticing.

So I fiddled around a bit and came up with a simple server-side script that not only allows you to use obfuscated mail-addresses, but also gives you the possibility to add some informations to the mail, the user is about to write.

PHP to the rescue. Assume that the link looks like that

<a style="unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl;" 
    href="redirect.php?mail=moc.elpmaxe@oof">
    moc.elpmaxe@oof
</a>

Then you simply need a server side script that look something allong these lines (here an example in PHP)

<?php
header('Location: mailto:'
        . strrev($_REQUEST['mail'])
        . '?subject=my%20Subject');

Thats all!

Nothing more!!

Simply reverse the string and send a Location-Header that instantly redirects the browser to a mailto-URI. That causes the browser to fire up the users default mail-client, create a new Mail, address it to foo@example.com and also set the subject to “my Subject”.

Update
There is a module for ZendFramework2 for that at https://github.com/heiglandreas/OrgHeiglMailproxy