osx86 Island

Spotlight search in entourage sometimes stops working, and no matter what ‘rebuild’ options you choose inside entourage, the search just won’t cooperate.

A year ago I had this problem and struggled to fix it, now, a year later I had the problem again, but forgot how I fixed it.  After struggling for a bit, I remembered what I had done before.

This may not be the case for everyone, but for me, the problem wasn’t because of entourage, it was because of OSX’s own spotlight database.  I had manually done it via terminal before (deleted old stuff and rebuilt new spotlight database), but this time I tried a little app called “Maintenance” (v 3.8 at the time of this writeup).  I simply chose the rebuild spotlight index option, and ran it.  A couple seconds later it gave me a notice that it had completed, then, if you click the spotlight button up on the top-right-hand-side of your mac, you’ll notice it shows that the database is rebuilding.  I went to lunch, came back, and it had completed.

I performed a search in entourage, and, much to my satisfaction, everything worked again.

The download link to this utility is here:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/maintenance.html

I hope this helps someone else out there, as it managed to frustrate me twice now.

First off, I’d like to say thank you for all of the wonderful comments I’ve received over the last year or so about this single-post-of-a-blog.  Secondly, I’d like to point out that everything you are reading about the Snow Leopard install below, is pretty damned out of date at this point.  The install was originally based around a Dev release, which on its own makes it sketchy, but it was also poorly worded in some points (sorry, I tried to make it readable!) and included files that ‘not everyone’ needed.  Most people who delve into projects like that plan on doing a ‘one time go’ and having everything working.  OSX on a PC isn’t usually that simple, let alone if you are doing ‘manual installs’, and even less friendly if you are doing such an install from an obscure Dev release.

Someday I may delve back into the realm of osx86, but shortly after writing that article I had given up hope on the ATI mobility ever working in my laptop with quartz extreme / hardware acceleration, and sold it for a few hundred bucks which I used to buy a second monitor for my ‘real’ computer.

I say all of this because you should know that, while the information, order of potential operations, and rough explanations of what’s happening below are all very useful, that tutorial should not be followed as an exact step by step guide, as it will surely result in you wasting more time than you want.  Please, continue to use it as a reference, but find the ‘up to date’ counterparts of the files below and use those instead, and if you are serious about running osx86, your best bet will almost always be to find a ‘distro’ that some of the osx86 pro’s put together – some of those are truly awesome, and much easier to deal with when you have multi-multi-multi installs to worry about before you get everything ‘just right’.

This isn’t the only reason I’ve come here today, I came here to share a note to the world about OSX and Entourage and how the OSX Keychain has changed the way it handles Certs.

The first time I installed entourage it went pretty smooth.  The second time, a year later, I had a problem with an SSL cert, but after a bit of fiddling around, I managed to get the cert warning to go away and everything to work properly again.  A year later again, I had installed another update to entourage, and received more cert warnings.  At this point I really struggled to get the cert to work properly, but eventually got it to go again.  And now, about another 6 months out, our company’s cert expired and I had to renew it.  I fumbled through that (much easier than I thought it would be, thanks to great guides online) and everything was working great for the pc’s where I work.  However, the mac and Entourage once again gave me a fight.

I am writing this to give the very simple solution that worked to install an entourage ‘exchange server’ certificate for me – because it took me an absurd 4 hours to stumble into in the first place, and outright pissed me off for something that should have been very easy from the start:

I went into IIS on the server with the cert, and exported it out as a password protected pfx file that included full directory listing information (or whatever the checkbox is called).  This step won’t be an option for most of you, so you’ll have to ask your admin to do it.  If he doesn’t know how, tell him to look it up, if a friggin Mac graphics guy knows his way around IIS (or wherever your server has your cert installed) better than the Admin, you have big problems.

Since some change in osx, I don’t know when, but presumably within the last year, Keychain changed the way it handled ‘root’ cert files, and I can’t just drop a cert file in there the way I would normally do it.  So, what I had to do was take my copy of that pfx cert file with a password in it, rename it to .p12 (this is the magical step that I didn’t know about…  why it can’t be named pfx I have no freaking clue, but OSX gets what OSX wants) and drag it into the ’system’ folder of the OSX keychain access application, put in the pfx/p12 password, and my root password, and it finally freaking let me install it properly.

For me that was all I had to do, but you might also have to open the Microsoft cert manager inside the office folder on your mac and make sure you have that same cert installed there as well.

So yeah, while this solution wont make sense to some of you, and to others it will be unnecessary because the ‘old’ way still works, I had a royal bitch of a time getting my email to work again after that cert renewal, so I’m throwing this up here in case someone else has the same issue.

Good luck!

We are glad you stopped by. I am happy to announce we have a Dell Studio Post Installer and will be adding others as time goes on including tutorials and video tutorials on how to install Leopard, Snow Leopard and Dual Boot. We are happy to help in anyway we can so if you need something specific please feel free to ask and we will try to help.

Thanks, Ridgeline