Stability Problems

Aylutar

Registered
I thought MacOS X was supposed to be stable...

I crash it WAY more often than I crash MacOS 9. As if crashing wasn't annoying enough, it bugs me that after I restart, my Dock preferences are all gone. But that's not all.

Each crash seems to increase the likelihood of crashes because the file system gets screwed up. Essentially, I have two questions:

1. When the GUI locks up, is there any way I can drop into Darwin to allow the file system to finish writing, and then restart from there?

2. What can I do in general to make MacOS X more stable.

Quite frankly, I rarely get the message, "[Application] has unexpectedly quit, but no other applications or the System have been affected." That's probably not the correct text, but who can blame me since I almost never see it? Instead, the mouse just freezes. The next thing I know, I'm sticking a paper clip in the side of my iMac.

I mean, just because the GUI goes down, that doesn't necessarily mean the kernel is hosed. So perhaps there is a way to just drop into Darwin? Sometimes my file system gets so screwed up, I just reinstall the whole damn system. I'm probably on my 6th installation now.

But mainly, I'm just tired of all the crashes. Can anybody help me?

Aylutar
 
Have you tried turning on the telnet service and telnetting into the system?

I occasionally have trouble with the GUI freezing, but I can usually telnet in
when that happens. More often, I have trouble with the power going to my
OS X box (which, due to a lack of outlets, is plugged into the power supply
spigot intended to run the monitor of another box). OS X does seem more prone
to eating its disk when the power unexpectedly goes off than other Unices I've
used, which themselves are more prone to eating their disks than other
operatings systems which take the time and trouble to carefully sequence the
updating of filesystem metadata.
 
I'm more of a software person than a network person. I'm not exactly sure on how to go about this sort of thing. The computer is on a network, but just a simple AppleTalk one. Unfortunately, the 7200/75 on the other side of it doesn't recognize my computer through AppleTalk when running MacOS X (go figure). And I have almost NO idea how to configure the telnet features.

Aylutar
 
Well, I don't know how much I can help you. I'm not much of an Apple
person, so I don't know the possibilities present in an Appletalk-only
network.

Enabling telnet is done by checking the "Turn on remote Telnet access" box
in the Sharing control panel in System Preferences. You'll need to unlock
access to the panel by entering the administrator password, but you don't
need to reboot. Assuming you have TCP/IP set up on the OS X box and your
other machine and a telnet client on the other machine, you should then be
able to telnet into the OS X box.

As far as making it show up in the chooser for your other box, you'll need
to enable AppleTalk in the AppleTalk tab of the Network panel of System
Preferences and then enable file sharing in the Sharing panel. You will need
to reboot to start AppleTalk.

Hmm. I just did this on my OS X machine and it _still_ doesn't show up in
the chooser. I'm fairly certain I had the machine showing up at one time, but
I apparently don't remember what I did. I can, however, get to the OS X
machine by clicking the "Server IP Address..." button in the chooser.

What I don't know about file sharing on OS X is whether it will actually share
files over AppleTalk; I suspect it uses AppleTalk to appear in the chooser but
then uses TCP/IP for the actual file sharing. This means you'll need TCP/IP
configured on your other machine to successfully connect to the box.

I should emphasize that I haven't tried connecting to an OS X box from a machine
which doesn't have TCP/IP set up; all of the machines on the network containing
my OS X boxes uses TCP/IP.
 
Use the power button on the front of the computer rather than a paper clip. It has always worked for me in OS X and it shuts the computer down properly when pressed rather than simply reseting it.
 
Do NOT turn on telnet! That is an evil suggestion (sorry). When I was installing linux on my mac before OSX Beta, i accidentally went over my download limit for my university and had to explain myelf to the all powerful network guy. When i talked to him, he warned me about linux because 3-4 machines running linux get compromised every day at my university. Why? because they turn on stuff like telnet and ftp (into ur machine, not out). So, when u send ur passwords through plain text, anyone can get access to ur machine and hav lots of fun.

But there is an alternative. SSHD is a secure sever. Add "SSHSERVER=-YES-" without the quotes to the last line of ur
/etc/hostconfig file. After rebooting, u can now securely longin to ur machine (ssh username@urIPNumber) from any other OSX machine in terminal, or any other machien in general with an SSH cleint (like Niftytelnet or F-secure).

Oh, I find that control-apple-restart works pretty good too. i'm glad they finally brought bak my favorite mac feature :) And if u want to "see" what ur system is doing during bootup to check for errors, hold down "v" to go into verborse mode. The end result of booting will be the same, but u can see the "guts" of ur system at work then.

HTH,
F-bcher
 
Originally posted by Aylutar
I'm more of a software person than a network person. I'm not exactly sure on how to go about this sort of thing. The computer is on a network, but just a simple AppleTalk one. Unfortunately, the 7200/75 on the other side of it doesn't recognize my computer through AppleTalk when running MacOS X (go figure). And I have almost NO idea how to configure the telnet features.

Aylutar

Wait, you have an IP right? I mean, u have to use TCP/IP to set ur ethernet/modem settings, like are u connecting via DHCP, etc. Question: can u get to the internet on ur OSX machine? Then I'm 99.999999999% sure u have an ip. u can get it out of the netword control pan... i mean system utilities app... err, whatever it's called now. U use that ip to telnet (please no) or ssh (please yes) into ur OSX machine from another machine as per the recomendations of my post above. Although i don't want u to use a telent server, u CAn turn it on in the sharing system utility, as well as the ftp server.

HTH,
F-bacher
 
Originally posted by Aylutar
I thought MacOS X was supposed to be stable...

I crash it WAY more often than I crash MacOS 9. As if crashing wasn't annoying enough, it bugs me that after I restart, my Dock preferences are all gone. But that's not all.


This is a known bug with OSX PB. I believe if you log out and in again, ur preferences will be saved.


Each crash seems to increase the likelihood of crashes because the file system gets screwed up. Essentially, I have two questions:

1. When the GUI locks up, is there any way I can drop into Darwin to allow the file system to finish writing, and then restart from there?

If you can get to a terminal window, yes. You would then either su to root and just typ reboot, or you can use the top command to view all processes in real time and kill the ones that are sucking up valuable processes (kill -PID#). Or u can set upp sshd.


2. What can I do in general to make MacOS X more stable.

Sort of depends on ur configurations:
-do u have more than 32MB of ram (I have 64 and works fine)
-do u have any third party hardware add ons?
-did u wipe ur hardrive before installing OSX?
-did u pay tribute to the Mac gods?
-have u been a little too impatient (waiting for things to get done?

All of the above and more can have performance effects. Personally, my machine only crashes when I try to open 100MB text files or other random crap like that.


Quite frankly, I rarely get the message, "[Application] has unexpectedly quit, but no other applications or the System have been affected." That's probably not the correct text, but who can blame me since I almost never see it? Instead, the mouse just freezes. The next thing I know, I'm sticking a paper clip in the side of my iMac.

I mean, just because the GUI goes down, that doesn't necessarily mean the kernel is hosed. So perhaps there is a way to just drop into Darwin? Sometimes my file system gets so screwed up, I just reinstall the whole damn system. I'm probably on my 6th installation now.

But mainly, I'm just tired of all the crashes. Can anybody help me?

Aylutar

I hear u man. Hope u figure out ur specific problem.

HTH,
F-bacher
 
Back
Top