Steam App OSX Stuck in Offline Mode

I wanted to update Steam to purchase some games in the annual sale, and unfortunately due to some proxy-related configurations it was forced into offline mode. When the system came back, the error indicated that steam was in offline mode, but had to be in online mode to update, then it quit. Very annoying, since changing to online mode requires you to be in the steam application.

I found the solution, you go to:
/Users/$yourusername/Library/Application Support/Steam/ and locate registry.vdf

The variable you need to set is Registry / HKCU / Software / Valve / Steam / Offline, which you set to "0".

Pretty surprising to see that Steam just ports what seems to be the windows Registry format over for configuration, but it seems to work (mostly :) )

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This entry was written by Alex, posted on 31/12/2010 at 02:48, filed under OSX and tagged , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Macports through a proxy

We have a proxy in work that prevents connections from being made out directly. I found out about the awesome MacPorts program, which is a bit like apt for OSX. It pulls backports from a repository and installs them for you.

There’s not a lot to the tool’s installation if you live on the open web, but I needed to do some stuff to get it working with our squid proxy.

If you run sudo port selfupdate, and get an error that says ‘port selfupdate failed: Couldn’t sync the ports tree’ or something like that, chances are your proxy is blocking rsync.

There are three steps. The prerequisites required for this to work are that you have the proxy address, admin access to your mac, and that the proxy supports the rsync port (873/tcp).

You can test the connectivity by going to http://rsync.macports.org:873, you should get the following error:

@RSYNCD: 30.0
@ERROR: protocol startup error

Step 1

If that works ok, then you need to set up the sudo environment for osx to let proxy environment settings through. First, edit your sudoers file with:
sudo visudo
Do not just edit /etc/sudoers

You need to append these lines:

Defaults env_keep += "http_proxy HTTP_PROXY HTTPS_PROXY FTP_PROXY RSYNC_PROXY"
Defaults env_keep += "ALL_PROXY NO_PROXY"

Step 2

Now, you need to set your http proxy
export http_proxy=http://proxy.example.com:8080
where 8080 is the port number of the proxy

Step 3

By Default, port uses rsync to manage its updates. RSync can use a proxy environment setting (man rsync for mre)
export RSYNC_PROXY=proxy.example.com:8080
Note the rsync proxy capitalisation, and the fact that it does not need http://

That should do it. You can then run selfupdate to get port to the latest version.

The hard way

If that doesn’t work, you can have a look at these instructions for replace rsync with subversion:
Syncing with SVN in Macports

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This entry was written by Alex, posted on 18/03/2009 at 17:41, filed under OSX and tagged , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.