Thursday, October 2, 2008

Fixing the sparsebundle error "Operation not supported on socket".

If you're trying to mount a .sparsebundle (typically a directory that contains a FileVault $HOME) and get an unexpected Operation not supported on socket error (aka EOPNOTSUPP / ENOTSUP for those who know what errno is) then the fix is simple: fix the permissions of the file within the .sparsebundle file. At least it worked for me. Some of the files were owned by root. So a simple
sudo chown -R $USER my.sparsebundle
did the trick.

Oddly enough I couldn't reproduce this problem by manually trying to chmod some files in the .sparsebundle. But I'm 100% sure that in my case fixing the permissions fixed the problem.