About

This is the default template for Pivot. You can change this text by editing the file frontpage_template.html in your pivot/templates/ folder. You can do this by directly editing the file, or you can go to Administration » Templates in the Pivot interface.

Tag cloud

Archives

01 Jan - 31 Jan 2003
01 Feb - 28 Feb 2003
01 Mar - 31 Mar 2003
01 Apr - 30 Apr 2003
01 May - 31 May 2003
01 Jun - 30 Jun 2003
01 Jul - 31 Jul 2003
01 Aug - 31 Aug 2003
01 Sep - 30 Sep 2003
01 Oct - 31 Oct 2003
01 Feb - 28 Feb 2004
01 Jul - 31 Jul 2004
01 Aug - 31 Aug 2004
01 Oct - 31 Oct 2004
01 Mar - 31 Mar 2005
01 Apr - 30 Apr 2005
01 May - 31 May 2005
01 Jun - 30 Jun 2005
01 Jan - 31 Jan 2006
01 Jun - 30 Jun 2006
01 Feb - 28 Feb 2007
01 Apr - 30 Apr 2007
01 Sep - 30 Sep 2007
01 Mar - 31 Mar 2008
01 May - 31 May 2008
01 Jul - 31 Jul 2013
01 Sep - 30 Sep 2013
01 Apr - 30 Apr 2014
01 Jul - 31 Jul 2014
01 Dec - 31 Dec 2014
01 Dec - 31 Dec 2015

Links

AngryOx.com
Tossable Digits - Cheap, Anonymous, Disposable Phone Numbers
The Internet License Plate Database
Love & Onions (Jen, my wife)
Roadie Speaks Blog
BananaForce
AdCritic.com
Slashdot
I Love Ben Brown

Search!

Last Comments

marshakaplan766 (Renaming your OSX…): Renaming your OSX Home Di…
GoaDarling (Wow, I'm fat.): Embark on an unforgettabl…
John smith (Centrum Silver Ad…): The Centrum Silver Ad has…
John smith (Centrum Silver Ad…): Centrum Silver ads often …
merryjhon (Centrum Silver Ad…): The Centrum Silver ad flo…
Hairmond (Wow, I'm fat.): Hairmond specializes in t…
MyCleanRServices (Wow, I'm fat.): MyCleanRServices is your …
RKCoatings (Wow, I'm fat.): RK Coatings brings life t…
TrustWorthy (Wow, I'm fat.): Trust Worthy offers the c…
GoaDarling (Wow, I'm fat.): Discover the magic of Goa…

Stuff

Powered by Pivot - 1.40.1: 'Dreadwind' 
XML: RSS Feed 
XML: Atom Feed 

Renaming your OSX Home Dir and Breaking Dropbox

Wednesday 16 July 2014 at 4:47 pm

I just got a shiny new MacBook Pro from work, but they set it up with the username “peterbeckman” even though everything else here is “pbeckman.” Being lazy and not wanting to type “ssh pbeckman@host” every time, and not also wanting to need to set up each host in .ssh/config I set off on renaming my account in OSX Mavericks.

Luckily some kind soul had already figured out how to rename your OSX Mavericks short username and posted it on the web. I followed “The full monty” instructions with great success.

But after reboot and subsequent login, Dropbox failed, complaining about permissions on my old Home directory. I didn’t save the error message, but it looked like it didn’t have permissions to the directory (because it no longer existed). I tried re-installing Dropbox, but that didn’t reset things.

After creating a symlink from /Users/peterbeckman to /Users/pbeckman (ln -s pbeckman peterbeckman) I was able to get Dropbox to start, but it annoyed me that it was still looking at my old $HOME. So I tried under Dropbox > Preferences > Account to change the parented home dir, but it complained that the Dropbox folder already existed. Well duh.

So finally I unlinked the account, removed the symlink, re-linked the account, and Dropbox found the existing files that had already been copied onto my host and all was seemingly well again.

Short version:

  1. Change OSX Mavericks short username and rename Home Directory to match
  2. Symlink your previous home directory to the new one
  3. Restart Dropbox
  4. Dropbox > Preferences > Account
  5. Unlink account
  6. Quit Dropbox
  7. Delete the Symlink
  8. Start Dropbox, Re-Link Account
  9. ...
  10. Profit!

Linkdump