hoakley July 28, 2020 Macs, Technology

Spundle 1.3 is now a Universal App and works fully in Big Sur

When Big Sur beta 1 was released to developers, I warned that my free utility for creating and maintaining sparse bundles, Spundle, had some compatibility problems with it, specifically when working with encrypted sparse bundles. I’m delighted to report that these have since been resolved, and I am now releasing a new version which I believe is fully compatible with all versions of macOS from Sierra to Big Sur beta 3, running on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

Spundle version 1.3 is a Universal App, and is now available from here: spundle13
from Downloads above, from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

For the sake of simplicity, I now intend releasing all updates in Universal App form. I will still leave the last Intel-only version on product pages, in case anyone does experience any problems with a Universal version. However, the auto-update mechanism will continue to prompt you to download the more recent version unless you disable it in the app’s preferences, something detailed in each app’s documentation.

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1

Joaquin Miller on August 10, 2020 at 10:03 pm

Finally–three times is a charm–I have something useful to submit.

I find I must, for a time, use disk images to have encryption on my RAID setup. With Spundle I easily created two HFS+ sparse bundle files. However, I find that ignore ownership is set. When I open the lock, then uncheck the box at the bottom of Info, Finder says:
The operation can’t be completed.
An unexpected error occurred (error code -50).

I did my reading this time, with this result:

temp@maud ~ % sudo diskutil enableOwnership disk9s2
Password:
Error encountered enabling user/group ownership: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-69860)

This could be a problem with the RAID software (SoftRAID). I’ll write them now. They have provided excellent support so far. (They are waiting for Apple to fix a bug in the API so that they can use FileVault encryption on volumes they create.)

Cordially,

Joaquin

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2

Joaquin Miller on August 10, 2020 at 10:27 pm

From man hdutil:

“By default, unknown HFS+ filesystems on “external” devices (including
disk images) mount with their owners ignored (mount -o noowners).
normally when owners are ignored, the system uses a special _unknown user
and group to dynamically substitute the current user’s identity for any
owners recorded in the filesystem. These _unknown owners are even writ-
ten to the volume when creating new files. The new files will continue
to have “floating” ownership when mounted with owners honored. The net
result is that shared volumes behave as expected regardless of how they
are accessed.”

Then, shortly later, this:

“diskutil(8)’s enableOwnership or the Finder’s Get Info window can be used to configure a system to respect the on-disk owners for a filesystem in the future.”

Since I can’t guess what the author means by “in the future,” I guess I’ll have to rely on maintaining physical security of the machine while the disk image with the highly confidential data of others is mounted.

“Yes, Senator, your staff is correct. I did go into the back yard to water the vegetables while that dusk image was mounted. And, yes, that is when someone broke into the house and stole the machine along with the uninterruptible power supply. Again, your staff is correct, that person would be able to get the decryption key for the data you are asking about.”

“Correct, Senator. I was too lazy to use Terminal to mount the image every time.”

So, perhaps, three times was not a charm. But thanks for your toleration.

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- 3
  
  hoakley on August 10, 2020 at 10:35 pm
  
  Thank you. I’m sorry that you have hit this issue, and hope that you manage to resolve it.
  Howard.
  
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