Topic: Knox / Did you fix the problem?

Yes, it is. This only affected a pre-release (beta) version of Knox.

Topic: Knox / Unable to change the user or group of files, dirs

Your diagnosis is the right one. Unfortunately we don’t have a flag you could set for this at the moment, so your only choice would be to mount the vault manually with “hdiutil attach vault.sparseimage -owners on”.

Topic: Knox / Mounting a vault at an alternate mount point

Unfortunately, other users are able to see the existence of open volumes even if they have no access to the mount point. So from a data security point of view, there doesn’t seem to be a benefit. There are other situations where custom mount points would be desirable – a lot of people have requested the feature in order to replace data at a fixed path with an encrypted copy – but so far we’ve resisted the urge and erred on the side of simplicity.

Topic: Knox / Does Backup 3.1.2 (by Apple) work for Know vault

Yes; Knox vaults are just regular files and any backup software should be able to deal with them. The only caveat when using software other than Knox itself for backup is to make sure that the vaults are closed when the backup is taken. If you take a backup of a vault while it is in use, the result may be an inconsistent and/or corrupted backup.

Topic: Knox / Alternative payment methods

In the nearest future, the answer is indeed likely to be “no”. We do, however, review the payment methods we support from time to time and it is possible that this will change. Meanwhile, we feel that supporting both PayPal and most major credit cards enables the vast majority of our potential customers to purchase Knox. If you are having a specific issue with a failing credit card payment, please contact us at the helpdesk and we’ll debug the issue together.

Topic: Knox / Too little space on USB stick

This is actually by design; Knox does not overwrite backups but instead deletes older backups only after a newer one has been successfully stored. This is done to ensure that a working backup exists at all times, even during the backup process itself.

Topic: Knox / Can't buy with Paypal

This was apparently a problem with PayPal’s systems. We have now implemented a workaround and it appears to have rectified the issue. Sorry about the trouble!

Topic: MK&C / Pyro on Leopard

That’s strange. It does work for us, and apparently for others as well. Did you try removing the Pyro preferences from ~/Library/Preferences/fi.karppinen.Pyro.plist?

Topic: Knox / Can´t open

Knox is passing the localized-by-the-system error message down as-is. The English equivalent is probably “No mountable file systems”, which means either a problem with the system or with the vault in question. Reboots have been known to help; alternatively, you can try repairing the vault in Disk Utility (available from Applications/Utilities).

Topic: Knox / Vault on remote server - alias not working

We’re working on the problem you describe, but as the fix implies some pretty low level changes to the way we monitor vaults for changes, making sure that we don’t break anything in the process is pretty tough. I hope we’ll get a new release out soon.

Knox vaults don’t have to be in the vaults folder for them to appear in the vaults menu, so you can just drag and drop the original vault on to the Knox icon (either in the Dock or the menu bar), and Knox will show it in the menu from that point on.

Topic: MK&C / Please! source code or fix...

If you don’t want Campfire-specific features, I suggest using Safari. The whole point of Pyro is the Campfire integration.

While I agree that an update to Pyro is overdue, I just don’t see the situation as that dire; we happily use Pyro, despite the Safari 3 -introduced problems, every day.

We do have fixes for some of the current issues in the pipeline. Of course, our commercial work takes precedence over Pyro, and I regret the minuscule amount of development resources that has left Pyro with. We have our reasons for not open sourcing Pyro, though, and they are not going to change regardless of the development schedule.

Topic: Knox / Two Accounts - One IMac

The problem with FAT (PC-formatted) partitions is a 4GB limit on file size; you can’t store more than 4GB on a single vault on such a drive. Other than that, they seem to work fine (although we still recommend using HFS+ drives).

Topic: Knox / Two Accounts - One IMac

No, Knox vaults can be opened on any Mac and any account with the right password. What happened when you tried opening the vault?

Topic: Knox / Error-41

We have not encountered any real-world limit to the size of Knox vaults, but, seeing that your problem seems to be related to the size of the vaults, I suggested dividing up your storage into multiple vaults as a workaround.

Knox vaults are Mac OS X encrypted disk images, and the error you are seeing is being generated by the operating system rather than by Knox. As it refers to memory being full, how much RAM do you have? What kinds of applications are you typically running? Which Mac OS X version is this happening on?

Topic: Knox / move vault to different mac

Yes, with the password, you can open a Knox vault on any Mac. Regular Knox vaults require Mac OS X 10.3; the AES-256 vaults are supported on Leopard only.

Topic: Knox / Multiple vaults show up in preferences

My best guess at this point is that those extra copies are Time Machine backups of the vaults. Would that make sense in your configuration?

Topic: Knox / Convert dmg or sparseimage on disk to "full disk encryption"?

It should work, but obviously it’s not a supported/preferred way of creating a whole-disk vault.

Topic: Knox / Error-41

Error -41 is a “memory full” error in Mac OS X (meaning RAM as opposed to hard disk space). We haven’t encountered this problem ourselves but be also tend to use vaults that are much smaller than the sizes you mention.

Would there be a way for you to divide the data into multiple vaults? That’s really what Knox’s user interface is geared towards.

Topic: Knox / how many hours/days does it take to create a fixed sized encrypted disc

Long. We’re thinking of ways to de-emphasize the “fixed size” feature in the New Vault dialog since it’s not really the best way to go in most of the cases—especially not for big disks. Here’s what the FAQ says about the subject:

Should I choose a stretchable or a fixed-size whole disk vault?
In almost all cases, you should choose the default stretchable type. It’s fast to create and easy to backup, as the encrypted disk image only takes as much space as the content you are encrypting. There are a couple of specific instances where you might want to use the fixed-size option. It creates an image that fills the whole disk with encrypted data (initially, encrypted zeroes). This takes a while (a long while if you have a large disk) but has some potential benefits as well. First of all, a fixed size vault does not reveal the amount of data you have stored on it to those without a password. Second, write speeds to the vault can be more consistent as the system does not need to stretch the vault as you write more data onto it. Finally, since the underlying non-encrypted volume has almost no free space, you can be more confident that someone will not accidentally store files on it.

Topic: Knox / Signup problem has been fixed

We’ve finally fixed the problem that prevented new signups to the forum. I’ve also removed all non-activated accounts so that anyone who encountered the problem can try signing up again. Sorry about this.

Topic: Knox / Full Disk Encryption = Hack?

Did you try the Disk Utility formatting with Knox running or not? It does not work with Knox running, but should work fine if you quit Knox first. During the whole-disk vault creation process, Knox repartitions the underlying disk with diskutil. That’s the only thing done to the drive.

Creating a whole-disk vault takes a long time if you choose the “fixed-size” option, because this implies writing the disk full of data. As you have found, writing a modern disk full takes a very long time as write speeds have not kept up with the increases in disk capacity. We recommend the default “stretchable” option for most situations. I’m now going to write a FAQ entry about this.

Topic: Knox / Full Disk Encryption = Hack?

We’ll have to investigate your crashers more before commenting on their cause, but they are definitely weird and not something we’re seeing from others. It is possible that it’s something specific to your system.

Can you try this:
- disconnect the drive
- quit Knox
- connect the drive
- reformat the drive with Disk Utility

Does this still fail? If it does, that could indicate a problem with the disk or the system that trips up both Disk Utility and Knox.

Knox full disk encryption uses normal encrypted disk images—just like the regular Knox vaults. The difference is that in normal operation, Knox hides the host volume so that only the encrypted vault appears. This is all done using public, documented Apple APIs and as such, we do not consider it a “hack”.

Topic: Knox / Read only image

We have now analyzed this problem, and an update to Knox that fixes this should be out in the near future.

The problem is that Knox opens a handle for all vault files it knows about in order to observe them for changes. In Leopard, this makes the system unable open the same vault file over a network for reading and writing. The system then defaults to opening the vault as read-only.

The fix is not trivial, though, which is why it will take us some time to get it out. Sorry about that.

Topic: Knox / Problem with Order

Big, big apologies to you, JF. I’ve sent you an email that hopefully resolves this.

Topic: Knox / Leopard upgrade

Don, how did you disable Time Machine for the vaults? You should add the location of the vault files (ie. Documents/Knox or Library/Knox under your home folder) to the “Do not back up” list, rather than the opened vault volumes themselves.

I use Time Machine for backing up everything but my Knox vaults, and it seems to work fine.