Rotophonic

A geeky blog discussing the world of music, technology & politics.

Posts Tagged OS X

Leopard’s Spots: Samba/Finder Crash After Wake from Sleep

Nov 13

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Leopard's Spots, Technology | No Comments




If you saw my previous post about bad sorting when viewing network servers in the Finder, you might notice something missing in this screenshot: all the PC’s on the network or Samba servers disappeared after I woke my computer from sleep this morning.

The only thing I could find in the system log was this cryptic error message:

11/13/07 9:25:49 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.samba.smbd[11536]) Stray process with PGID equal to this dead job: PID 11538 PPID 1 smbd

It’s the Finder’s fault. Relaunched Finder using the Force Quit dialog box and voilà, the PC’s and Samba servers have returned.

[UPDATE]
I have solved this issue. On my computer I currently host two IP addresses through my Ethernet adapter. It appears that the Samba client would randomly choose which IP address it would use for nmblookup calls. Once I deactivated the second IP, leaving only my primary IP on the LAN (where the PCs and Samba servers live), the servers appear AND they all appear to work now. It’s still a bug, but not related to the Finder.

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Leopard’s Spots: Installer ignores my hard disk

Oct 27

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Leopard's Spots, Technology | 7 Comments

I thought it was just a fluke, but Apple’s OS X 10.5 “Leopard” Installer seems to have a problem. After booting up from the DVD, the installer doesn’t see the HFS+ volume on the computer’s hard disk. It sees the physical disk, but it appears like the volume doesn’t exist (for most people, “Macintosh HD” is missing as a choice). This could be a major issue if a user doesn’t realize and chooses to reformat the hard disk.

As a very early adopter of Leopard (installed 10 minutes after receiving the DVD via FedEx), I was only a bit worried that somehow the installer had munged the HFS+ partition on my Macbook Pro (the only one on the disk, by the way). Before rebooting, I ran Disk Utility from the installer DVD and it only saw the physical disk, not the volume, so I rebooted back into 10.4.10 and whoa, my “Macintosh HD” hard drive was still there.

I would have thought it was a fluke, but in upgrading my iMac G4 this morning, the same thing happened. No hard drive volume visible in the installer. In this case, my external 250GB firewire drive showed up, but no volumes from my 40GB internal HD.

I rebooted the G4 and let it sit on the “Choose a language…” screen while I wrote this post and when I arrived on the “Select a Destination” panel, the installer had found the proper volume.

My theory is that the installer starts some sort of disk verification (which unmounts the volume), but inexplicably allows me to continue through the install process. What gives? Anyone else seen this issue?

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