Sunday, November 4, 2007

Use Quicksilver to access Hidden files (Adium temporary fix)

I recently upgraded from Mac OSX Tiger to Leopard. I was having trouble with Adium not being able to sign into MSN accounts. It turns out that Adium has a bug and can not resolve the hotmail DNS very well, it's a hit and miss.
After checking out some blogs the quick-fix was to add the IP and hotmail domain name to the Host file. I had made modifications to the host file on Tiger with NetInfo Manager but Leopard did away with NetInfo Manager and there does not appear to be an application that easily modifies the host file. For those of you that have tried to access hidden files through Finder know that it is not a simple task to access hidden files. 

USING FINDER:

To access hidden files with Finder: (you have to set a AppleShowAllFiles switch to True)

 1) open a Terminal Window. Located in Applications/Utilities/Terminal

 2) Type , 'defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true' without the quotes.

 3) Hit enter and in order to see the changes take effect, log out or restart your computer and relaunch Finder. 

       Now you can access the host file by the path , Macintosh HD/Private/etc/hosts.  Make sure that you have access to write to it (right click on the file and select Get Info to adjust access)

  You might be asking, why don't you just use command prompt or Terminal to change the host file?  You can do that too, but I wanted to add and remove to the Host file manually.

USING TERMINAL:

    To use the terminal to change host file do:

 1) access the Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal)

 2) Type: sudo su

 3) Hit Enter,  then enter your password

 4) then type: 
      cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak
      echo 65.54.239.20 messenger.hotmail.com >> /etc/hosts
      echo 6554.179.216 nexus.passport.com >> /etc/hosts
      echo 65.54.183.203 login.live.com >> /etc/hosts
      exit



This is the TEMPORARY Adium fix. You can actually enter those IP's and DNS to fix the login issues with hotmail accounts. 

   To revert back after Adium fixes the the issue. Use the Terminal command prompt to change things back again.

   1) Access the Terminal.

   2) type: sudo su

   3) hit Enter, and enter your password

  4) cp /etc/hosts.bak /etc/hosts
  
  5) exit

  This will change back your settings.

The Reason I didn't want to use the Terminal to add and delete to Host file was that I wasn't sure what was going to be deleted I reverted back, or changed the host file to it's original state.

 This long drawn out Blog entry is to show that you can access hidden files with QuickSilver, this is how.

USING QUICKSILVER:

   1) Access QuickSilver. Start entering Mac and one of the top options is Macintosh HD

   2) Select Macintosh HD but before opening it up with the action 'Open', enter "Alt - /" . This will give you access to all the hidden files in that Folder. 

    3) now you can use QuickSilver to access the host file, Macintosh HD/Private/etc/hosts

   By entering "?" you can move up a level if you get to the hosts file but want to access 'etc' folder to change the 'read/write' security settings of the host file.

These are different ways to do the same, I suggest using QuickSilver to access the hidden file, 'private/etc/hosts' to access the host file and making the modifications you need manually.


Best Regards,

  Juan

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My comment. Good thing I know nothing about programming stuff. This was helpful. Thanks.