HCS Blog

System Integrity Protection (SIP)

Apple has implemented a new security feature in 10.11, System Integrity Protection, which prevents even super users from altering the contents of files in key System folders. The flags for restricting the folders is applied at the time of installation and cannot be overridden. SIP is designed to protect System files from malware and viruses. 

Disabling SIP requires booting into the recovery partition to run the Terminal command below.

# csrutil disable

which should confirm with status message:

Successfully disabled System Integrity Protection. Please restart the machine for the changes to take effect.

Reboot back into the El Capitan system partition.  

To re-enable SIP, boot back into the recovery partition and set state to enabled:

# csrutil enable

Some users still feel the need to use Office 2011 and have been having a problem with Word and other apps quitting on launch. Rebuilding the database, trashing preferences, cleaning cache didn’t solve.

The solution for Word and Excel quitting on launch is to turn off Error Reporting.  

You can turn Error Reporting off by navigating to /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MERP2.0/Error Reporting

Launch Error reporting. In the application dropdown menu, select Preferences.  Uncheck Enable Microsoft Error Reporting.

Changes will not take effect until you relaunch your Microsoft applications.

CrashPlan error "Out of memory", or not enough memory causing the application to keep quitting and restarting.  

Solution: 

A big thank you to Kevin White on clearly explaining this change....

Only Macs with AES-NI (Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions) will auto convert to Core Storage when you upgrade to Yosemite. 

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Install\ OS\ X\ 10.10/ --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/ --nointeraction

For quite a few versions of OS X, you could find the email address history for Apple Mail in ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr.  However, with Mavericks that file is no longer referenced.  So if you are ever tasked with a manual migration of Apple Mail data, you will need to know where to find this updated file location.  First we should note that Apple Mail is a sandboxed application.  So it's resources live in a protected area in ~/Library/Containers.  Drilling down a bit further, we will find ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.corerecents/recentsd/Data/Library/Recents/Recents.  That is the file you will need to copy over.  Secondly, Mavericks aggressively caches preferences so even after quitting and restarting Apple Mail, this change may not take effect.  One easy way to get around this may be to restart.  However, you can also kill a process called cfprefsd in Activity Monitory (or the command line) to clear this cache and Apple Mail should update its address history.