Fixing 10.8.3 sandbox and safe boot issues

Quite frequently these messages popped up in my system.log:

Jun 3 00:32:13 zoidberg.z.net mdworker[5556]: Unable to talk to lsboxd Jun 3 00:32:13 zoidberg.z.net sandboxd[5560] ([5558]): mdworker(5558) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd

Browsing for an explanation for these sandbox issues I found out that they're not quite uncommon for systems which were upgraded directly from 10.6 to 10.8 (exactly what I did). A frequently recommended solution is to boot into safe mode, which I tried. However, my machine would always freeze at the same fsck stage during safe boot. It turns out that this is due to a bug in fsck_hfs in OSX (at least up to 10.8.3) which pops up when your machine has more than 2GB of main memory. Luckily It's easy to workaround this bug, by putting a fsck_hfs cover in place which always provides the necessary -c2g option to fsck_hfs.

$ sudo -s # mv /sbin/fsck_hfs /sbin/fsck_hfs.orig # cat << EOF > /sbin/fsck_hfs #!/bin/sh echo /sbin/fsck_hfs -c2g $* /sbin/fsck_hfs.orig -c2g $* EOF # chown root:wheel /sbin/fsck_hfs # chmod 555 /sbin/fsck_hfs

[Source]
After booting into safe mode and logging into my account, it seems the sandbox issues have indeed vanished.

This bug has been fixed in OSX 10.8.4.