Every new feature comes with its own troubleshooting as most will, if only eventually, have problems. Lion comes with a cool new feature where the state of each application is saved and when the application is re-opened the windows are just as you left them when closed, even in the same positions on the screen. This can be pretty useful with something like Terminal, where I often don’t restart the app for long periods of time because I want to see my recent history across multiple sudo’d users. When you open Terminal, the previous commands are grey, but there. But I’ve run into a few instances where an application crashed…
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Xsan + serialnumberd Troubleshooting
With Mac OS X 10.5.8 and 10.6.x, Mac OS X Server, Xsan, Final Cut Server and a number of other serialized products were switched to a whole new solution for managing serial numbers: a newly redone serialnumberd. If you run otool against serialnumberd in 10.5.7 and below you’ll notice no dependencies; it stood alone so to speak. If you run otool against the latest and greatest then you’ll notice that it has a number of dependencies that run the gambit of otherwise unthinkable services. This caused minor growing pains during the summer with multihomed network connections, maximum number of clients and other aspects of servers with certain solutions, but that…
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Simple Networking Commands
Troubleshooting the network is faster and more thorough when it is done using the command line. Here are some simple command-line utilities that can perform a variety of tasks that can help when administering many services and multiuser environments: Whoami lists the user you are currently logged in as from the command line. Who lists the users logged onto your system. Id shows a list of all defined users and groups whether they are actually logged in. Groups <userid> shows a list of all the groups a user is in. Whois lists ownership information for domains. Hostname lists the name of the computer you are currently working on. You can…
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The Cut, Copy & Paste Daemon in OS X
Ever seen com.apple.pboard in a launchctl list? Wondered what it did? This is the infamous clipboard (aka – pasteboard, or on the iPhone the NSPasteboard server). If you unload the pboard entry in launchctl then you will no longer be able to cut, copy and paste. pboard relies on the existence of and the accessibility to the user that initiated pboard (ie – root) to have access to the /tmp folder. Therefore, pboard will be wonky without /tmp and without pboard you won’t be able to paste things. So, when troubleshooting cut, copy and paste issues, first verify that /tmp exists and then verify that pboard is running using the…
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NetWare + Portlock
When you run into booting issues with NetWare it’s often a simple fix. Move a file, edit a file, rename a file, etc. But getting to the point where you can actually implement the fix can be a pain. The Portlock Boot CD can come in pretty handy at this point. It enables you to mount a file system and edit it even if the host will not boot properly. It’s not that I’m saying that you should invest more money into that crusty old NetWare environment in most cases, but in some cases it can be a saviour…
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Xsan: Stripe Group Down Errors
If you are getting Stripe Group Down errors in your Xsan logs then this usually means there is a problem with your workstation accessing LUNs in the environment. This can be an issue with a given workstation having problems seeing the SAN fabric or it can be a problem with any other system seeing the fabric. You will notice the system having the error indicated in the logs. Check Apple System Profiler (keep in mind Apple System Profiler sometimes requires a reboot to refresh the LUNs it has access to via Fibre Channel) to see if the indicated LUNs are present. If all LUNs give an error (one per line)…
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Setting Compatibility Mode for Windows Applications
Some applications need a little help to run. If it’s an older application and it will not launch then think about changing the compatibility mode. In order to do so, right-click on the application and click on the Compatibility tab. From here, set the compatibility mode to a previous version of Windows and then try to fire it up. Might just help…