Dude! Where’s My Guest Account?
After writing this article to give readers a overview of FileVault 2, I noticed something on my MacBook Pro. I was missing the Guest Account which is a special type of user that has very limited access to your Mac. That was a bit of a fail because that’s actually a good security feature as it allows a thief who steals your Mac to connect to the Internet, which in turn allows you to find your Mac using the functionality found in Find My Mac and you then have the option of sending the cops to get it, locking it, sending a message to it (example: “If found, please return it. Reward offered”) or erasing the contents remotely.
When I looked in System Preferences and Users And Groups, I found that the Guest Account was activated.
I was left scratching my head for a bit as that should mean that everything should be working. So I decided to try an experiment by deactivating and reactivating the guest user. That worked. I can only conclude that when I transferred my data over from my old MacBook Pro (which had the Guest Account working) to my new MacBook Pro, something must have gotten trashed. Thus turning it off (which kills the account) and back on (which creates a new account) would cure that. Weird.
Hopefully this is the last thing that I have to fix on either of the MacBook Pros. But at least this experience is giving me all sorts of topics to share with you in case you hit similar problems. That way you don’t have to make a trip to the Genius Bar to get them solved.
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