Tips on Notes

User interaction is not allowed

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 18:23:03 +0000

This errors happened to me sometime ago, but today I saw it again on a coworker Mac.

You’ll get the error on the Terminal, with commands that want to use MacOS Keychain passwords. I’m sure there is another element at work here, but I could not find it.

In this case, the error on docker login was this (you’ll get a similar error with git fetch or git pull):

Error saving credentials: error storing credentials - err: exit status 1, out: `User interaction is not allowed`

The command line tool is trying to access a Keychain Item, and this item is protected to only be used by some applications. On normal conditions, this would trigger a graphical pop-up asking for permission for this new application to access said item, but in this case he fails to launch the pop-up and therefore, rejects the action.

To fix, open the Keychain Access application, search for the domain you were trying to access (in the case of docker login it would be the private registry address, or hub.docker.com), edit the entry, select the tab “Access Control”.

You can then add permission to the application you need by taping the “+” button on the lower left, and picking the correct file, but I don’t have a easy way to discover what is the correct file to add. If the problem is docker login you could first try to add the command /Applications/Docker.app/Contents/Resources/bin/docker-credential-osxkeychain.bin. For git pull or git fetch issues, try to add /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/libexec/git-core/git-credential-osxkeychain.

If you don’t know which command line application is the culprit, you can just disable access control for this password item by making sure that the “Allow all applications to access this item” option is selected and “Save Changes”.

You should try to find the correct application if possible, but the second options will work. No security, but it would work.

brew info

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 08:40:15 +0000

Small, quick, tip: before installing the latest wow app with brew install wow-app, take a minute to scan brew info wow-app in a separate terminal.

Two main reasons:

some of the time, it will tell you that you have a lot of options to enable or disable some features. You might need some of them, and usually this requires a new compilation;
most of the time this includes what next steps are required of you to properly configure, and you can read them while the app installs.

Either way, this will save you some time, and you might learn something new.

Tip: notify long running terminal jobs via Growl

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 20:10:18 +0000

Sometimes you need to run some script or program that will take a long time.

What I usually do is opening a new window, start the script, and then minimize or send to the back that terminal, leaving a small corner visible to serve as a status. I could glance to the visible corner and look for the prompt to see if had ended.

Now, I use this little super simple script (could also be a bash alias, probably):

 #!/bin/sh
 #
 # Runs script, and prints a notification with growl when it finishes
 #

 $*
 growlnotify -m "Script '$*' completed" -s "Background script notification" &
 # --script ends here--

My version is called n, just n. So I can type n update_mini_cpan and have a nice notification when it finishes via Growl.

Test with n ls -la if you want.

Some things you learn or discover

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 15:53:21 +0000

During the last 48 hours a lot of things have happened and I dealt with a lot of hardware. I took some notes for future reference.

First, always take a camera with you. Take pictures of everything, and then catalog them. You can always go back and see how things where inside your servers or around them. Don’t remember if a ethernet cable is connected to the onboard ethernet or the external one? Just go and look.

Second, some vendors have some strange notions about accessibility, so be prepared.

Third, forget about boot floppies and CDs, just install a recent linux distribution in a brand new IDE disk, and use that as a rescue system.

Fourth, make sure your backups work, and make sure they are compreensive.

Fifth, if your monitoring system is hosed, don’t wait a month or two to put the new one in place.

That’s all folks,

Mail.app enhancements

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 17:39:24 +0000

Nuno was complaining about the lousy support of multiple profiles in Mail.app. I agree with him, but today I noticed that I already was using some obscure features that make it all easy :).

First, in the preferences account panel, you can put several email addresses, comma separated. They will all show up in the drop-down in the Compose window, so you can change the From address easily. With MailEnhancer, you can even change the signatures auto-magically.

For this and more plugins, try this MacZealots article, or this list.