Coriolis Systems Blog

iDefrag 2.2.0

2012-05-16T00:51:17Z

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 2.2.0 of iDefrag. NOTE: The auto-update feature is broken in versions 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 so if this applies to you, please get the update directly from our website. For earlier versions, the auto-update feature should work fine and you can simply select “Check for Updates…” from the iDefrag menu.

In this version we have added support for creating a recovery partition and running iDefrag from it (just as we did with iPartition). You can read more about that particular feature here. To use this feature, simply select “Create Boot Disk…” from the iDefrag menu and follow the instructions.

We also fixed a number of bugs and we sincerely apologise if any of them affected you. You can read full release notes here.

We are aware of some customers who have had problems using iDefrag’s exclusive restart feature with FileVault on 10.7.4. We’ve been unable to reproduce it reliably here. If you do encounter problems with this version and you have trouble booting your machine after trying, simply hold down the “Shift” key soon after you power on your machine and then your machine should boot normally. As with any problem you encounter, we ask that you let us know about it so we can improve our software. As an aside, we’re not convinced that you will see a big benefit from defragmenting volumes that are encrypted using FileVault because it has it’s own fragmentation which iDefrag doesn’t tackle and any performance benefit that you might see from using iDefrag is likely to be insignificant compared that incurred from using encryption.

Please contact or support team with any feedback or support requests.

iPartition 3.4.0

2012-03-14T07:05:11Z

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.4.0.

The major new feature in this version is the ability to create a recovery disk with iPartition on an external drive (including USB flash drive). This feature is Lion only.

There are also a number of other bug fixes.

This update can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or via the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition 3 itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed. (You will need an Atom enabled browser such as Safari to make sense of that page.)

As usual, if you have any problems or feedback, please contact our support team.

New password change form

2012-02-29T12:53:10Z

When we first set up our website, we didn’t allow user-specified passwords; we just generated one, and that was your password (rather like a registration key, in a way). This was obviously not ideal, so pretty soon we started allowing customers to specify their own passwords — but we wanted to make sure that the passwords were reasonably strong as we do occasionally see attacks on our systems.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, we started out using cracklib, an Open Source password checking library. Over time, two things became apparent:

The checks that cracklib does are in some cases too onerous.
When the check does fail, cracklib does not give error messages that are understandable or useful to end users.

Now, we prefer to spend our time working on our products rather than our website, and this was a relatively minor issue (some of you didn’t think so, I accept, but you were in the minority) and had an easy workaround of using a somewhat more secure than necessary password and storing it in Keychain (or in your chosen browser’s password database). As a result, while we were aware of the problem, it took us a while to get around to doing anything about it.

Attempt number two was based on another piece of Open Source code, pwtools, which is a port of the algorithm from the OpenWall Project’s passwdqc to Python. This was a distinct improvement, and we’re actually still using it to generate and suggest passwords, but it still ended up with some customers puzzled as to why it was rejecting their passwords when they felt they were perfectly good enough. We didn’t always disagree.

Anyway, I’m pleased to let everyone know that we are now on attempt number three. This time, we’ve written the code ourselves rather than borrowing from others; fewer passwords should be banned, and because we have a Javascript implementation of the checking code it’s now possible to see in real time in the Change Password form how strong we think your chosen password is.

I’m sure there will still be people who want to use a password that our form doesn’t like. Hopefully, though, this should now mean that the password they’ve chosen is genuinely bad as opposed to not meeting some unusual rule that someone else has come up with. If you were one of the people who wanted to set their own password but found it too tricky, please do try again and let us know how you get on.

p.s. Please don’t use the same password on multiple websites. While we’ve implemented our site in such a way that we can’t tell what your password is, not everyone does, and some database administrators and website operators will, as a result, have access to the text of your password. It’s much better to use Keychain Access or 1Password so that you can have separate passwords for each purpose.

OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Developer Preview

2012-02-20T10:12:50Z

We’ve received a number of queries (and a few bug reports) relating to the OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion developer preview, some in under 24 hours from the developer seeds becoming available. To be clear:

We do not recommend running disk utility software (anybody’s, not just ours) on pre-release versions of Mac OS X. For all we know, Apple has made changes to the filesystem that require updates to our code.
We do not provide support for use of our software on developer preview versions of OS X.
Developer pre-releases of OS X have been known to contain serious bugs, some of which could result in data loss. While we are aware that some end-users like to run the developer previews, they are really intended for developers to test their products in advance of the release of the new version, and Apple does not even recommend that developers run the seed releases on their main development systems.

Finally, please remember that, no matter how many people have access to it, developer preview software is covered by a non-disclosure agreement. We will accept bug reports (though it may be a technical breach of the NDA on your part), but under the terms of the Developer Agreement the only place we can talk to you about the developer preview release is the Apple Developer Forums website, and that isn’t an appropriate place for us to provide support.

iPartition 3.4.0 Beta 1

2012-01-12T10:00:00Z

UPDATE: Beta 3 is now available.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of a beta for the next update to iPartition. This beta version is available to all existing owners of iPartition. It can be downloaded here. If you’re not already logged in, you’ll be asked the username and password that you use for our site.

So what’s new?

As owners of iPartition will know, you cannot manipulate the disk that you have booted from which has meant that, to repartition your main start-up drive, you need to either boot from an external drive, or create a bootable DVD. To help with creating a bootable DVD, we have a feature in iPartition that allows you to create a bootable DVD, either from a template that you download from our site, or from the DVD installation media that came with your machine. Unfortunately, newer machines no longer come with DVD installation media and the latest downloadable template that we have (which is supplied by Apple), will not boot newer machines. We have asked Apple for updated templates but we don’t have them yet.

With Lion, Apple introduced Lion Recovery. This works by having a separate partition on your hard drive that includes a base system allowing you to reinstall Lion over the Internet. Internet Recovery is a related feature but is supported within the firmware of the machine (and therefore is only present on the latest machines).

In this version of iPartition, we’ve added support for creating a duplicate of your Lion recovery partition containing our applications. Obviously, to use this new feature you will need to be running Lion and you will need to have a recovery partition present (which should usually be the case, but we have heard of cases where the recovery partition is missing).

You will also need an external drive or USB flash drive to install the partition on (since the restriction of not being able to manipulate the disk you booted from still applies). The partition takes up a little over 650 MB (at time of writing), so you don’t need a very big drive. Cheap USB flash drives are readily available.

The duplicate recovery partition should operate in exactly the same way as your existing Lion Recovery partition (i.e. you can reinstall Lion and run other utilities) but you will also have the option of running iPartition. We’ll soon be adding support for iDefrag too.

If the external drive already has data on it, the data should be preserved (iPartition will shrink existing partitions to make room) so long as it uses the correct partition scheme (GUID). It will warn you if that’s not the case and you can, of course, use iPartition to change the partition scheme non-destructively.

After creating the recovery partition, you can boot from it by holding down the Option (⌥) key when you power on your machine.

We are particularly interested in hearing from customers who received their machines with Lion pre-installed. If that applies to you, please give this Beta version a try and let us know how you get on.

This version of iPartition also has a number of bug fixes and other minor improvements. Those of you who have reported issues with the current shipping version should find them all fixed with this release.

As always, please send feedback/queries to our support team.

iDefrag 2.1.1

2011-10-20T10:00:46Z

Yesterday I released version 2.1.1 of iDefrag. Unfortunately, I’ve just discovered that there is a problem with the auto-update feature in version 2.1.0 which means you cannot update automatically. It is intermittent and it can sometimes succeed on faster machines which is why we did not notice it initially.

The bug was introduced in version 2.1.0 when support for quick termination was added. Quick termination means that when you quit an application it will quit much more quickly (but only when the application isn’t doing something). Regrettably, it broke our auto-update feature.

If you want to update to version 2.1.1, you can download the update directly from our website. If version 2.1.0 is working well for you, there is no need to upgrade to version 2.1.1 since the changes are relatively minor (see release notes).

Sadly, when we release version 2.1.2, the same problem will exist and upgrading to that version will also have to be done manually (if you’re running version 2.1.0 and 2.1.1).

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused our customers.

iPartition 3.3.2

2011-10-19T02:10:45Z

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.2.

This update contains a number of bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition 3 itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed. (You will need an Atom enabled browser such as Safari to make sense of that page.)

As usual, if you have any problems, please contact our support team.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

2011-10-06T08:06:43Z

Without Steve Jobs, we might not have had the home computer. The graphical user interface and the now ubiquitous mouse might have remained in a lab at Xerox PARC. Pixar might have come to nothing, and we might still be waiting for high quality 3D special effects and animated films. NeXT computer might never have existed, and with it Objective-C (and possibly Java too), never mind the Cocoa frameworks and modern Mac OS X. We might not have had Truetype fonts, or Unicode, the tablet computer (the first, of course, being the Newton, though the iPad is the one everyone will remember) or the iPod. It might not have been possible to buy music, movies or TV shows easily online. And let's not forget the impact the iPhone has had and continues to have on the mobile telephony market. The influence that Steve has had on our daily lives, both directly and indirectly, is hard to overstate.

Today is a sad day, for we have lost a great man.

Here's to Steve.

iDefrag 2.1.0

2011-09-21T10:32:46Z

We’re pleased to announce the release of iDefrag version 2.1.0.

This update contains full support for Lion and some other minor bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iDefrag 2 itself. You can find the release notes in the iDefrag 2 Atom feed. (You will need an Atom enabled browser such as Safari to make sense of that page.)

As usual, if you have any problems, please contact our support team.

DigiNotar certificate security issue

2011-08-30T09:29:32Z

We’ve been made aware of a security issue caused by the Netherlands-based CA DigiNotar, who mistakenly issued a valid SSL wildcard certificate for google.com. The existence of this certificate, coupled with the implied lack of proper verification at DigiNotar, means that we consider it inappropriate that our systems continue to trust DigiNotar to issue SSL certificates.

As a result, effective immediately, we have instructed our machines (including our servers) not to trust the DigitNotar root certificate. This should not have an impact on customers unless you are (or your mail server admin is) using DomainKeys (aka DKIM) to certify outbound e-mail and the certificate you are using was issued by DigiNotar; in that specific case, there is a slightly increased risk that your e-mail will land in our junk filter. The fix, should you be in this situation, is to use a certificate issued by someone other than DigiNotar.

Microsoft has already removed the DigiNotar root certificate from its list of trusted certificates, and Mozilla has indicated that the same will happen with Firefox. Users of Safari (and indeed Mac OS X in general) may wish to take the following steps to disable trust of the DigiNotar root CA:

Start Keychain Access (you can do this from the Spotlight menu by entering “Keychain Access” in the search field, or by going to “/Applications/Utilities” in Finder).
Enter “digino” in the search field at the top right.
Double-click the “DigiNotar Root CA” certificate.
Open up the “Trust” settings.
Change the “When using this certificate:” setting to “Never Trust”.
Close the certificate window. You’ll be prompted for an admin username and password.
Ensure that the DigiNotar Root CA now looks like this in Keychain Access:

In particular, check that it says “This certificate is marked as not trusted for all users”.

Update (14:35 BST)

Owing to an apparent deficiency in the way Safari behaves with respect to root certificate trust (about which I’ve already filed a bug report), it may be better to simply delete the DigiNotar Root CA certificate altogether, since this will result in a more obvious response from Safari when visiting a site that depends on it.

To do that instead, select the DigiNotar Root CA certificate in Keychain Access, and choose “Delete” from the “Edit” menu.

Possible Lion filesystem bug (may affect iDefrag)

2011-08-16T11:01:36Z

Over the past day or so, we’ve spotted a couple of worrying messages on Apple’s support forums and mailing lists about a possible filesystem bug in Lion (10.7), in particular:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/Macos-x-server/2011/Aug/msg00195.html

and

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15933171#15933171

While we haven’t yet been able to reproduce or verify these reports, if they are real, it is possible that they might be triggered by the “Quick (on-line)” defragmentation option in our iDefrag product. They will not occur with the off-line algorithms as those use our own code rather than Apple’s for accessing the disk.

Note that, if these reports are to be believed, the bug is in Apple’s implementation of HFS+ itself, and not in any of our products. We’re drawing attention to the problem primarily to warn our customers of a possible problem, and not because we or any of our customers have seen or reported the problem ourselves.

VMOptimizer

2011-08-11T05:23:02Z

We’re very pleased to announce the release of VMOptimizer, a new product that optimizes VMware virtual disk images.

For more information, please see our product page and give the demonstration version a try.

Lion Compatibility

2011-07-22T13:27:01Z

Many people are asking whether or not our products work with Lion. As of today, the current versions of both iDefrag (2.0.5) and iPartition (3.3.1) are compatible with Lion, with the following caveats:

iDefrag’s “Reboot and defragment” mode does not function with Lion (yet… we are working on this). As a result, to run an off-line defragmentation algorithm you will need to boot from a different partition or disk, or from a bootable DVD, which you can create by choosing the “Create Boot Disk…” option from the “iDefrag” menu.
iPartition will display the partition type for Core Storage partitions as 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC, which is the GUID (Globally Unique IDentifier) that Apple is using for Core Storage. This is expected behaviour, but we will be adding a name for this partition type in the next update.
iPartition is not able to format or non-destructively resize Core Storage (i.e. Lion FileVault) partitions. As far as we are presently aware, there is no documentation for either the Core Storage volume format, or for the associated library that ships with Mac OS X, and it is therefore unlikely that we will be able to support Core Storage in iPartition any time soon.

We intend to release updates for both iDefrag and iPartition in due course to address some of these issues.

UPDATE: We have now released version 2.1.0 of iDefrag and version 3.3.2 of iPartition which have full Lion support.

iPartition 3.3.1

2010-11-02T09:12:24Z

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.1.

This update contains a few bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed.

Please contact our support ream if you have any problems with this new version.

iPartition 3.3.0

2010-10-08T06:49:24Z

We’re pleased to announce the release of iPartition version 3.3.0.

This update contains some new features (basic cloning support) and a few bug fixes, and can be downloaded either from the My Account page on our site, or from the “Check for Updates…” option within iPartition itself. You can find the release notes in the iPartition 3 Atom feed.

We have also released an updated version of iDefrag Lite which now contains some of the features available in iDefrag 2 along with a few bug fixes.

Please contact our support ream if you have any problems with this new version.