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Yesterday I decided to jailbreak my iPhone. Today, I’ll share with you some things I learnt during the failed attempt!

Firstly, DO NOT attempt to jailbreak your iPhone from a MacBook Pro running Leopard 10.5.6 … all the indications are that you’ll end up with a MacBook with no keyboard or mouse, an an unchanged iPhone.

So what did I learn?

Two safety precautions

If you are the adventurous type (in terms of installing stuff on, or messing with the configuration of your MacBook), make sure that under System Preferences you have enabled Remote Access via ssh and Screen Sharing before you start messing. I suggest that it’s safe to leave these settings on at all times.

Enable ssh via Recovery DVD and terminal

Assuming that you have no working keyboard, you can enable remote access (ssh) by following these steps

1. On another equivalent system, enable remote access using System Preferences
2. Copy the file /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh.plist to a USB key
3. Rename the file to ssh2.plist
4. Boot the target machine from the Mac OS X DVD by holding the ‘C’ key down during startup
5. Open a terminal session
6. Insert the USB key and copy the ssh2.plist file from the key to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ on the boot disk drive (look in /Volumes or use df to get the mount points)
7. Reboot normally … ssh will be enabled.

Enable Screen Sharing via ssh

So you’ve got access to a Mac via ssh (remote session in terminal), but the machine is not configured for Screen Sharing and you don’t have physical access to the machine. Start a remote terminal session and do the following

$ cd /Library/Preferences
$ echo -n enabled > com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd

You can now access the system using screen sharing.

Watch for my future post on a successful jailbreak!

Recovering from DFU Fix by hackintosh

If, like me you’ve broken your system by unsuccessfully applying the DFU fix available from hackintosh, the preceding tips will most likely be of help. Once you have Screen Sharing on the broken box, download the 10.5.6 update and reapply it to get your machine back.

Caveats

These tips are for hackers. If they make things worse for you my answer is simple… It Worked For Me

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