hoakley November 25, 2019 Macs, Technology, Updates

Consolation 3.5 tells you how many log entries, and more

It’s incredibly easy to get a log extract in Consolation which contains more than 100,000 entries, and until now the only indication has been that the app is slow at handling so many. It has also been easy, particularly when you first start trying to use it, to accidentally run Consolation from a non-admin account, and wonder why it keeps throwing errors. These are two of the issues addressed in a new version of Consolation, 3.5.

Now, when you open the Consolation app, it performs three checks before going any further:

Once the app has initialised, it checks its integrity against its code signature, as do all my apps now. This protects you from accidentally corrupted copies, and from any that have been tampered with by malware.
After that, it checks whether the current user is a member of the admin group 80. If they’re not, it displays an informative alert, following which it quits.
Finally, it may check to see if there are any updates available.

The second step is new with this version. It does mean that my old workaround app RunConsolation is unlikely to work with this, but by far the best way to address the requirement – which is enforced by macOS as a requirement to obtain extracts from the unified log – is to use fast user switching, and run Consolation from an admin account. That is also most likely to work fully.

If you find this works well, I will introduce the same check to other apps of mine like T2M2 which also rely on log extracts obtained in the same way.

Consolation offers special formatting options for log entries which use colour, and let you customise exactly which fields you wish to see and how. This slows down when trying to work with huge log extracts, and humans find it hard to wade through more than a few thousand at a time. So that you have a more accurate idea as to just how large a log extract is, Consolation now displays this in two ways: as the number of log entries, and as the number of lines of text (paragraphs) which are actually shown in the log view.

This helps you plan what actions to take, and how long to expect them to require: when working in a custom format mode, it can take minutes to reparse and reformat tens or hundreds of thousands of log entries. You can also use this to improve search predicates, and even get basic statistics such as how many entries contain <private>.

I have also taken the opportunity to improve user feedback when Consolation is hard at work. It now displays the ‘busy spinner’, although because much of the processing involves reformatting styled text, this appears to have to take place in the main thread, and locks you out of most interaction with the app, such as scrolling the text output. I am going to be working on further optimisations to try to improve this.

I hope you find this new version an improvement.

Consolation 3.5 is now available from here: consolation35
from Downloads above, from its Product Page, and through its auto-update mechanism.

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1

Justin McMurtry on November 28, 2019 at 8:44 pm

Re: “to use fast user switching, and run Consolation from an admin account”

I gather, Howard, that even on a Mac that has only one human user, you would advocate establishing a separate “admin” user account to be logged into only when Administrator permissions are required to do something, alongside one’s regular user account used for normal everyday work and play, which is intentionally set up so that it does _not_ have Administrator permissions.

I understand the basic reasoning behind this scheme, but I’ve not been convinced that whatever benefits to be gained are worth the substantial increase in account complexity and management overhead… but I’d welcome a fuller explanation from you, along with some best practices for those who choose to use the separate-admin scheme.

Thanks, ~ Justin

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- 2
  
  hoakley on November 28, 2019 at 9:00 pm
  
  Justin,
  The standard and supported configuration for macOS, as recommended by Apple, is to establish the first and primary user account as an admin user. If you wish to run normally as a ‘regular’ rather than admin user, standard practice is to make that a second user account, and work from there.
  Unfortunately, without consulting with users or developers, Apple decided that only admin users can obtain any data from the unified log. Consolation (and several other of my utilities) use the log command to retrieve data from the unified log, as until 10.15 it has been the only way of doing so. So those apps have to be run as an admin user.
  As they are GUI apps (if you want command line access, use the log command directly), the approved way of obtaining admin privileges within the app is to write a separate helper tool which setuids to obtain those privileges. That is complex, and I regret something that I have no interest in wasting many days of my time coding and getting it to work, particularly as Apple doesn’t AFAIK even provide a code example.
  A lot of users miss the information which I give explaining that Consolation etc. must be run as an admin user, and frequently try to run it as a ‘regular’ user, then run into problems doing so. Unless someone is prepared to donate working code which I can use to give the app the privileges, the simplest solution is to test whether the current user is in the admin group. Therefore, if you acquire admin privileges without logging in as an admin user, you won’t be able to run this new version of Consolation.
  If you can come up with a better solution, I am extremely receptive to that. However, the great majority of Mac users run as the primary admin user (I do, all the time), and of those that don’t, I think you’re the only person I have ever come across who refuses to have an admin user account – something which I had always thought made it almost impossible to use a Mac to its full.
  Howard.
  
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3

Justin McMurtry on November 29, 2019 at 2:32 am

Yikes, it seems I completely failed to make my intended meaning clear… my apologies! Let me try again.

What I’m trying to say doesn’t really have anything in particular to do with Consolation or the macOS unified log. Rather, your passing mention of using fast user switching in order to change from an interactive session that doesn’t have admin privs, to one that does — which presumably would only be necessary if the “regular” account one normally uses for everyday use of the computer is _not_ an “admin user” — inspired me to raise a tangential question about the relative value of two options for how to set up the user login account(s) on a Mac that has only one human user:

(1) There is only a single user login account — username “justin”, for example — which has admin privileges, and which is always used for doing _anything_ on the computer, whether ordinary general usage or system-administration tasks; —OR—

(2) there are _two_ user login accounts: one is a _non-admin_ account — again, username “justin”, for example — which is used for ordinary general usage; and the other is a _separate_ user login account — username “admin”, let’s say — which _does_ have admin privileges, and which is used _only_ when performing a system-administration task for which those privileges are required.

As I understand it, the purpose of separating admin privileges from your regular-activities login account is to minimize opportunities for something — be it malware, a software bug, or user error — to seriously muck up the system in a way that can happen only with admin privileges.

Now, I’ve almost always used option (1) above: I have a single login account, which has admin privileges, and which I use while doing anything whatsoever on the computer. I’ve briefly tried setting things up according to option (2) above, a time or two, but such experiments have been short-lived, as with each trial I quickly decided that the security benefit was minimal and not worth the added complexity of having two user accounts to deal with — each complete with all its settings and documents and ~/Library data — rather than just one.

While reading your main post on this page, I got the impression from your paragraph that begins “The second step” and ends with “to work fully” that you would generally advocate option (2) over option (1)… and based on that impression, I was inviting you to explain your reasons for feeling that way. But I’m sensing now that I may have misinterpreted your intent — that you actually prefer option (1) for yourself, and were simply making the comments in that paragraph for the benefit of those folks who choose to operate under option (2) instead.

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- 4
  
  hoakley on November 29, 2019 at 9:27 am
  
  Justin,
  My apologies for misunderstanding you. I had assumed incorrectly that your question related to the change in the way that Consolation works in this latest version, and that you were unhappy with that.
  I have always (since the first beta of Mac OS X) run almost entirely as the primary admin user, and only seldom had any ‘regular’ user enabled or active.
  The Unix and security experts will say that this isn’t the best plan. However, it is a very practical one which ensures you can get on with your work as you need, rather than wasting time switching user to do many daily tasks. Consolation is but one small example of where that gets awkward.
  That said, I respect that some users prefer to run as ‘regular’ users normally, and only switch to being admin when they need to. The only times that I have had ‘regular’ user accounts on my Macs have been for specific purposes, where I wanted to be able to switch straight into a set configuration. I did this for a while to get standard screenshots for publication, for instance.
  The one user configuration thing that is important is to disable any Guest Account, which is a clear security problem. I’m not sure why macOS still offers this as a regular feature.
  So if you, like me, have just the single and primary admin user, and work in that, rejoice! And unless you feel compelled to do anything different, I wouldn’t change.
  Howard.
  
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5

Jeff on January 9, 2020 at 10:15 pm

Thank you for Consolation and your posts on the unified log! I was completely lost before I found them, and now I am slightly less lost, if just as miffed at what Apple has done to logging on the Mac.

I have one request though: would you consider changing the font you use in the log extract view to a fixed-width one—perhaps Menlo?

Jeff

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- 6
  
  hoakley on January 9, 2020 at 10:21 pm
  
  Thank you.
  Ulbow now has monospace fonts, and once that is in first full release I will be adding them to Consolation. The system monospace font is fair in 10.14 and earlier, but really good in Catalina. Why not take a look at Ulbow to see?
  Howard
  
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