hoakley May 19, 2019 Macs, Technology

Consolation and other log utilities Support

This page is for your support questions and comments on my free utilities Consolation, RouteMap, Whither, Woodpile, MakeLogarchive, DispatchView, and blowhole.

Full details, current versions, known issues, and much more about these and related tools are on this page.

You can also email me if you prefer: my address is given in the About page for this blog.

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1

David Brown on June 9, 2019 at 7:02 pm

Howard – Thank you for the many utilities you provide. They are very useful and well designed. It would be great if the user could increase the font size in the results returned Right now, on the monitors I use, the font is quite small for my aging eyes! Thanks much.

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- 2
  
  hoakley on June 9, 2019 at 9:55 pm
  
  Thank you.
  I am trying to do this as I update each app in the current cycle, but it’s turning out to be a frustrating process. In most recent versions of my apps, where there’s a scrolling text view, you should be able to click in it, select all, and then change the font settings. These aren’t enduring, though, and only apply to the current text displayed there. Although the views have the same settings in most of my apps, some don’t allow that, and Cmd-+ doesn’t work. I’m not sure why that is, and also want to make the changes more lasting. One option would be to have a preference setting, but few of my apps have preferences at present.
  So yes, I am working to try to improve this, although with some difficulty. Please bear with me – it will eventually get better.
  Howard.
  
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  - 3
    
    David Brown on June 9, 2019 at 10:14 pm
    
    Thanks for the response and the tip. I had tried your suggestion in Constellation and T2M2, but in each the Format…Font menu was not accessible. I’ll look forward to the updates!
    
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    - 4
      
      hoakley on June 12, 2019 at 7:55 pm
      
      Coming for T2M2 in the morning (Thursday). Consolation is going to be a bit more complex, though.
      Howard.
      
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    - 5
      
      David Brown on June 13, 2019 at 4:24 pm
      
      Thank you for letting know about the new version. I just tried it – very nice implementation. My eye’s thank you! 🙂
      
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6

David Brown on July 8, 2019 at 3:04 pm

Greetings. I have been enjoying learning how to use Consolation; it has already been useful. I would like to suggest that the font used in the window of results be mono-spaced, which would result in the fields “lining up” in columns. I think the results would be easier to read.
Thanks for you consideration.

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- 7
  
  hoakley on July 8, 2019 at 6:03 pm
  
  Thanks.
  I presume that you’re using the syslog or default formats? I’ll put it on the list of things to do in Consolation, but can’t guarantee when it will happen.
  You may also find it better to move up to the customisable and coloured log formats, which contain only the information you want. They aren’t columnar, though, hence the use of colour for formatting.
  Howard.
  
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  - 8
    
    David Brown on July 9, 2019 at 4:59 pm
    
    I had forgotten about the option for color. I feel a bit embarrassed because when I re-read the section of the manual on styles, you even state that color formatting helps quite a bit. In any event, thanks.
    
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9

Pierre on August 27, 2019 at 9:45 am

Thank you for your efforts.
Right now I’ve large problems with Consolation (3.2 on Mojave 10.14.6).

First, Consolation starts with a non-lethal error :
Consolation3[43894:1127194] +[NSXPCSharedListener endpointForReply:withListenerName:]: an error occurred while attempting to obtain endpoint for listener ‘ClientCallsAuxiliary’: Connection interrupted

Then the app crashes whenever I try to select a log file. I briefly see an “Open File…” window but then it hits a segmentation violation.

And last, inspecting the system log shows me nothing.

I suppose fixing the first error should help, but I don’t know how to proceed. Console gives me :
Consolation3[43894]: assertion failed: 18G87: libxpc.dylib + 90677 [7DEE2300-6D8E-3C00-9C63-E3E80D56B0C4]: 0x87

Thanks for any suggestion.

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- 10
  
  hoakley on August 27, 2019 at 9:56 am
  
  Thanks.
  I suspect that you’re blocking the app from checking whether there are updates available by making a connection to my GitHub to obtain the latest version info, which accounts for the first problem.
  I presume that you’re trying to open “a log file” by clicking on the File radio button at the top, which invites you to select a logarchive? I have absolutely no idea why that is crashing – it uses standard calls, and crashing with that suggests the problem may lie with your system configuration. Is there anything non-standard about that? Are you really intending to open a logarchive, or do you want to browse the unified log? You may find it helpful to look through its documentation, perhaps.
  Howard.
  
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  - 11
    
    Pierre on August 27, 2019 at 10:35 am
    
    This was a swift (!) reply.
    I’ve indeed LittleSnitch but it’s not blocking the access to github (disabling LittleSnitch doesn’t change anything). There must be indeed something nonstandard somewhere. Not the first time I see some libxpc-related errors. Thank you anyway.
    
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    - 12
      
      hoakley on August 27, 2019 at 11:10 am
      
      You can turn update checking off altogether by setting the noUpdateCheck flag in Consolation’s preferences:
      defaults write co.eclecticlight.Consolation3 noUpdateCheck false
      should do that, and might help perhaps.
      Howard.
      
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  - 13
    
    Pierre on August 27, 2019 at 12:26 pm
    
    Ha, I got it. All the bugs vanished when I started Consolation from an admin session. I previously launched it from my user session, in a Terminal window and logged as admin, as I routinely do with Console, and it doesn’t seem to like it. In fact, I just checked that this technique works with Consolation if you add a sudo at the beginning of the call.
    Great utility, it helped me diagnose some sleep problems, thank you!
    
    So as a suggestion, Consolation could maybe check whether it has all privileges it needs and exit gracefully whenever this isn’t true.
    
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    - 14
      
      hoakley on August 27, 2019 at 1:19 pm
      
      Ah. I’ve never seen the app crash before like that: normally it runs fine until you try to get a log extract, which returns no log entries at all. There’s no privileged code in it apart from when it calls the log show command, when you click on the button to get the log.
      I’m afraid that I can’t find any straightforward way of checking the privileges the app is running under.
      Howard.
      
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15

blackxacto on September 2, 2019 at 7:56 am

Sir, this morning I tried to run Consolation3.2 on my 17,1 iMac w Mojave 10.14.6. I use a 2TB SSD main drive w a 6TB RAID and a 1 & 4TB external drives for backup and storage. I received a crash. Below were my settings. I received no report after clicking GET LOG. I tried it several times and nothing. Did I do something wrong? I entered the time 5 secs before and 20 secs after the crash time per iStatMenus.

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- 16
  
  hoakley on September 2, 2019 at 8:07 am
  
  Are you running as an admin user? If you’re not, then the log show command returns nothing, no entries at all.
  If you are running as an admin user, then that means there are no log entries during that period. Try an earlier time until you locate the final log entries. I have further hints in this article about crashes and here about navigating events.
  I hope those help.
  Howard.
  
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17

blackxacto on September 2, 2019 at 8:09 am

Yes as administrator. Will check you articles, but first try the longer time periods. Thank you for responding and this great app.

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18

blackxacto on September 3, 2019 at 12:16 am

2019-09-02 02:27:04.822071-0500 localhost com.apple.WebKit.Networking[45994]: (libnetwork.dylib) [com.apple.network:activity] Create activity
2019-09-02 02:29:04.000000-0500 localhost (null)[0]: ((null)) localhost timesync: === system boot: 84FEBAED-E2F6-4C08-9A12-C56EE543783E

Sir, I had a crash at 2:27:34 according to iStat. Where was this in the Consolation report above? I copied the report, just as it flowed. I show my Consolation settings in a paragraph above.

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- 19
  
  hoakley on September 3, 2019 at 6:25 am
  
  If those are consecutive entries in the log, then whatever happened occurred so quickly and so badly that no entries were written to the log – or the kernel panic also wiped the log buffer in memory without it being written to disk.
  The second of those entries marks the beginning of startup.
  Look down from that to see if there’s any evidence during the startup, such as a cause code for the restart.
  Howard.
  
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  - 20
    
    blackxacto on September 3, 2019 at 7:45 am
    
    Thank you for explaining what may have happened to the missing time log. I will look further for signs of the crash result.
    
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