Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Many people assert that the Mac is secure simply because it’s an obscure platform. Needless to say, this hypothesis is completely untestable and therefore equally as valid or invalid as any other hypotheses concerning Mac security. “Security through obscurity,” these people declare, “is no security at all.” Yet, ironically, they purchase for themselves, and recommend for others, NAT firewalls for their broadband internet connections. NAT is the very definition of security through obscurity. For these hypocrites, security through obscurity is a rhetorical weapon they choose to wield against a platform they irrationally dislike or don’t bother to understand, and at the same time it’s a perfectly acceptable barrier between their computer and the often-menacing outside world.

Be consistent!

Mac OS X, like any unix, has certain system maintenance jobs that run daily, weekly, and monthly. Those jobs are usually set to run in the wee hours of the morning when computer usage is likely to be at its least. This turns out to be a problem for notebook users because, unlike a desktop, notebooks are more likely to be powered off or asleep at the time those system maintenance jobs would usually run. Cron isn’t very smart, so if a job is supposed to run at 3:00 AM, and 3:00 AM passes while the computer is asleep, the job is never run. Cron doesn’t check back to see what it missed, it only knows what it’s supposed to run right now, so on many notebooks these basic system maintenance jobs are almost never run.

Every once in a while, a Mac OS hints and/or tips site posts someone’s latest brainstorm about how to deal with this quirk. I don’t question the validity of these methods since I’ve never tried them, but I know there’s a very simple way to deal with cron jobs that are missed.

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