El Capitan Archives

How to disable System Integrity Protection on OS X El Capitan

System Integrity Protection was introduced in El Capitan to add another layer of security to OS X. The system prevents the root user from doing things that are potentially harmful. Apple did this because any app at any time may ask for the administrator password and execute commands with elevated permissions, which is a big … Read more

How to burn an ISO image with OS X El Capitan

Sometimes it’s important that things change for no apparent reason. You know, the way they move things around in supermarkets just to drive you crazy. If you’ve tried burning an ISO image to disk in El Capitan recently, you know what I’m talking about: because the option to burn an ISO has been removed from … Read more

How to use the new Apple System Font SAN FRANCISCO on your website

Apple have a new System Font in El Capitan and all of their other products starting 2015: it’s called San Francisco. It’s very similar to their previous font Helvetica Neue, but apparently San Francisco is better for your eyes (not to mention the fact that Helvetica Neue isn’t owned by Apple, and obviously we can’t … Read more

OS X Server vs. Parallels Desktop – Overhead Differences

Screen Shot 2015-11-04 at 10.28.17

Ever wondered if there’s a difference in overhead and memory usage when you’re using a VM instead of OS X directly? Here’s a comparison for website hosting.

The above graph shows the difference of hosting one of my websites for the last few days on OS X Server (in blue) that I got from Hostgator (using their HostGator Thanksgiving Deal 2016 coupon), and in a CentOS VM under Parallels Desktop 10 on the same hardware (in red).

The traffic logs show that the amount of requests and visitors has remained the same, so we can deduce that the load put on either OS X and the VM is the same. There is a little more overhead when using the VM, but not as much as I had feared: the requests have to be forwarded to another software layer after all, and that takes some CPU power.

Let’s have a look at memory next:

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How to install MySQL on Mac OS X El Capitan

MySQL 2015

There are several ways to install MySQL on your Mac, for example:

  • compile from source
  • use the Homebrew package manager (http://brew.sh)
  • use a nifty script courtesy of Mac Mini Vault (http://git.io/eUx7rg)
  • or use the dedicated MySQL installer package (recommended)

I recommend the dedicated installer because it’s the only package that will also add a convenient Preference Pane for starting and stopping the service.

In this article I’ll focus on the latter, and I’ll also talk you through how to add MySQL to the PATH variable and how to secure MySQL to keep the evildoers away from your server.

These instructions will work on Yosemite and El Capitan (I’ve tested it on both systems – in fact that’s part of why I’m writing this, so that I can remember for next time).

 

Screen Shot 2015-11-02 at 10.40.12

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