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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Mac OS X Update 10.2.4 Resets 135

Posted by pudge from the only-on-the-west-coast dept.
Oculus Habent writes "It may just be me, but 10.2.4 reset a number of settings on my computer, including icon sizes, window positions, and dock size and contents. Minor annoyances, but completely unnecessary. Is anyone else experiencing this?" As for me, Apple re-added some apps to my Dock and overwrote all my changes to httpd.conf (though it did back it up first) to add mod_rendezvous_apple. But those problems pale in comparison to some others: Anonymous Coward writes "If you upgraded your Mac desktop to 10.2.4 last weekend, check your date and time. Many users have suddenly found it to be 4:00 PM, December 31, 1969 again. Apparently, this happens whenever they are shut down or restarted, and resetting the motherboard and/or the PRAM doesn't fix it. Complaints have been piling up at Apple.com and prices for batteries have been skyrocketing - but relax. It's not your battery!"
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Mac OS X Update 10.2.4 Resets More

Mac OS X Update 10.2.4 Resets

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  • No such panic for me...sky is still up (Score:5, Interesting)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:06PM (#5323147)
    I updated two computers.... G4 and an iBook. The only issue I had was needing to modify my httpd conf for on the G4 for PHP. No date issues....no moved icons..no lost internet...no droppy socks and the cat still has two different colored eyes.

    I submit that as usual, the majority of issues are not directly related to 10.2.4. If you move apps where Apple's installer doesn't expect them to be (and don't whine how it is your computer and not Apple's), you'll have boinked links, and dock icon issues. If you've done a poor original install, you'll have issues with system updates, whether the bad install was your gift to the afternoon or not. Get over it...the sky hasn't fallen...this is not OS 9, and the sooner we all get used to a modern OS the happier we will be.
    • I am running a machine that has been upgraded steadily from 10.0 up 'till now with every new version and patch of OS X as they come out. No problems going to 10.2.4 except for the aforementioned httpd.conf.

      Silly that although PHP is installed, and the AddModule and LoadModule lines for the PHP module are in httpd.conf ready to be uncommented and spring into action, that a simple commented out line like
      AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
      is not present in the httpd.conf. It would be nice to simply find and uncomment all the lines in httpd.conf that contain the letters PHP and have it do its thing!
    • If you move apps where Apple's installer doesn't expect them to be (and don't whine how it is your computer and not Apple's), you'll have boinked links, and dock icon issues.

      I understand why the system files should be left well alone but it *really* annoys me that the updaters get picky on the location of the 'Applications' folder. I have the core OS on its own partition and I put the apps on a larger partition. I even give the OS a clue by making '/Applications' a symlink to the actual location of the apps. Why then do updaters insist on replacing the symlink with a new '/Applications' folder? Why can't it just follow the damn link? It's not so bad when an entire app is updated - just drag it into *my* apps folder and the job is done. The real PITA is when an app bundle is partially updated and you have a folder full of crud to merge with the original.

    • I've no idea what I've done: I've moved all Apple apps back into their original positions, fixed permissions, everything, but *no* Apple installer will work on my machine any more. 10.2.4. iCal 1.0.2. They all crash (OK, 'unexpectedly quit') as soon as they start looking for things.

      Looks like a complete reinstall job. And I *swear* I haven't buggered about with things that much, if at all... Pah.

      That said, I love OS X. Bloody masochist that I am... :)
    • I would agree with this, but when I installed the update my pointers in my dock to iChat and iCal broke. Since these are Apple products, and I installed them using default settings, I can only assume that the update is in fact unnecesarily changing some system information.
  • an error in Finder. Clicking a graphic file with a preview icon automatically generated by the Finder still refuses to look "selected" as typical icons do. Normally, when you click an icon, it'll go 25% darker. This doesn't happen to thumbnailed graphics.
    • Clicking a graphic file with a preview icon automatically generated by the Finder still refuses to look "selected" as typical icons do. Normally, when you click an icon, it'll go 25% darker. This doesn't happen to thumbnailed graphics.
      Not broken here. Looks like they go 50% darker, however.

    • Re:Still haven't fixed... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah I see that too. Though I don't think it has anything to do with the Finder-generated preview, because I see it on other icons too occasionally. It doesn't do it all the time.

      I also see an occasional problem when I have "FILE.jpg" and "FILE.psd" files in the same folder, i.e., the file from my camera and it's edited version. I keep the folders in Icon view with 128x128 icons. Whenever I save the .psd from within photoshop, the same icon appears on both files! sometimes it appears on other adjacent files too, or sometimes the icons just disappear (but it still works to click in the empty space).

      Drives me nuts, this does!
      • Photoshop pastes it's own self-generated icon in the files resource fork. That's completely separate from what I'm referencing. In this case, the Finder builds a thumbnail icon based on the file, and doesn't update it's resource fork.
    • Same problem here. Only happens on the desktop, as far as I can tell - but I use column view whenever I'm hoping around the rest of the hard drive, so... who knows.

      I'm so damn glad they fixed that bug with the icons on the desktop moving all sorts of odd directions if you put them on the left side of the screen - it was driving me nuts.
    • taking the whole stability of OSX for granted - sometimes it does this - no biggie, just re-launch the Finder or sometimes, when worst comes to worst - reboot. I had similar problems, so just ALT-COMMAND-ESC ;) and relaunch.

  • Works for Me (Score:3, Informative)

    by yancey ( 136972 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:12PM (#5323172)

    I grabbed 10.2.4 as soon as it came out.. indeed, even before it was mentioned on Slashdot! I have not seen any of the problems mentioned.

    Though the httpd.conf file was probably replaced, I wouldn't have noticed since this is a laptop and I don't use Apache very often.

  • zero problems for me (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:18PM (#5323197)
    Everything worked fine for me. Nothing reset, no changes to the Dock. I don't know if it makes a difference but I downloaded the tar file directly and ran the update later, rather than using Software Update.

    Haven't seen any time/date changes, but my clock is set by NTP anyway.

    PS: One thing I like to do before any major update is run something like "find -s / > /tmp/filelist" to get a list of all files and dates. Then run it again after the update and diff the two lists. That will show you httpd.conf changed, for instance. Also it's just interesting to see what files change on the machine as I learn about the OS. You can also get lists of files from the archive itself or from the "bill of materials" file ("man lsbom") after installation.

    PPS: does anybody know what the file /iNode12022737 is for? I keep seeing files like that in the root dir...
    • > PPS: does anybody know what the file /iNode12022737 is for? I keep seeing files like that in the root dir...

      That looks like an orphaned file, where there is still a file associated with an inode, but no file name associated with it.

    • Re:zero problems for me (Score:3, Informative)

      by Halo1 ( 136547 )
      You can simply do the following to see what files will be changed:

      lsbom MacOSX10.2.4.pkg/Contents/Archive.bom

    • I went back to 1970 once I rebooted following the install. Once it was online it found a timeserver and sorted itself out so no big problem there. It's not been rebooted since and won't be until the next big update so I've no idea if it always jumps back to 1970 or not.

  • It happened to me! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Visigothe ( 3176 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:20PM (#5323205) Homepage
    I thought it was rather odd as well. I had icons for iChat, the addressbook, and some other applications that weren't on the dock pre-update. My time wasn't affected to my recollection, but some of my other prefs were.

    Know what I did? I removed the icons, and fixed my prefs. Then I promptly forgot about the whole thing and got on with my life.

    I did find it strange though... That sort of thing has never happened to me before

  • Yeah right. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Daleks ( 226923 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:23PM (#5323223)
    I know lots of people that use Mac OS X (me included) and they never experience any of these supposed catastrophic failures when updating their system. I smell a MS smear campaign.

    • Re:Yeah right. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Oculus Habent ( 562837 )
      I'm a big Mac fan, personally. None of my failures were catastrophic. I haven't shutdown since the upgrade, so I can't speak to the clock issue, but the Dock was quite unusual - it was OS-install fresh for me. Everything was in the proper places (sort-of reply to above posts about friggin with the OS) - I keep iCal, Safari, and Terminal in my Dock and they were all missing. Maybe I'm just lucky.

      As I mentioned, the changes were more annoyances than failures. I've been quite happy with Macs throughout history, even with the IIsi's sound glitch, the PowerBook 190's power connector, the PB 1400's CD-ROM faces (Three of they have broken, two for me, one for a friend). The difference between my Macs and my PCs is my Macs have never had serious failures. I've lost drives, RAM, processors, motherboards, and modems on my PCs (RAM was cheap, though) and the worst I've done with my Macs is buying bad RAM and a broken LCD from shipping.

      I've unintentionally stepped on all three PowerBooks I've owned (maybe I should be more careful) and none of them have broken for failed for it. I actually stepped out of bed on my Pismo - full weight on the closed computer - and it didn't even wake up.

      If you want catastrophic software failures, how about the three times NT 4.0 has just stopped recognizing keyboards for me, or the two times Win 2K decided not to make it through boot anymore?
    • I'm getting used to Mac OS X. Previous versions of Mac OS weren't going to be on any computer I owned, but Mac OS X is fine. Not as solid as Linux yet, but I can run MS Word natively and the TiBooks are nice.

      Having attempted to establish my credentials as a non-MS fan (sadly I really do need to use MS Word, although OpenOffice is getting close to being compatible enough to avoid that), let me say that

      1: The upgrade to 10.2 broke Mozilla's Java support for m2.

      2: The upgrade to 10.2.4 broke my httpd.conf (a quick fix on each of two machines, but this is a little sloppy of Apple).

      3: Each upgrade breaks sendmail (an even quicker fix, as I have a script that fixes the permissions so that sendmail will send mail for me).

      Mac OS X is a lot better (for my uses) than Mac OS 9 could ever be, and in some ways it's ahead of other Unix-based systems -- but in many ways it is still somewhat immature (10.1 felt like a beta release, 10.2 fixed 90% of my problems). I'm glad Apple finally released a fairly robust OS, but it does still have some problems. As do they all.
    • well 99% of people have no problem, its just that the other 1% get noticed more

  • FWIW... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gabe ( 6734 )
    ... I installed 10.2.4 on my G4 iMac when it was released and I've had zero problems with it.

    I'm a little more fearful about it touching my powerbook G3 (pismo) though. I've frequently had problems with that machine and updates. I've had to completely backup/wipe/reinstall the damn thing at least 5 times due to problems with OSX. It seems that they give considerably less of a damn about older machines than the do about the cream of the crop.

    I'll wait a while before installing it on my powerbook.
    • Pismo is what I had my glitches with. I haven't had any issues that I've noticed prior. It took a damn long time to install this update, though. Only changes I've made to mine were 512 MB RAM and an AirPort card.
    • I installed it with no problems whatsoever -- no changed prefs, nothing moved in the Dock, certainly nothing catastrophic like a messed-up clock -- on a 400 MHz iMac with 320 MB RAM, certainly not the cream of the crop. YMMV, of course, but I don't think Apple is deliberately screwing over older computers or anything.

      -- shayborg

  • Protecting your OS from changes (Score:4, Informative)

    by kruetz ( 642175 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:39PM (#5323282) Journal
    I'm guessing the installer/updater plays along with the *NIX user system, right? So what about "chmod a-w httpd.conf" for protecting your httpd settings? If you don't want your settings modified by Apple, use the power of *NIX against it!

    Or does this not work?

    • Re:Protecting your OS from changes (Score:5, Informative)

      by Visigothe ( 3176 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:50PM (#5323328) Homepage
      I'm guessing the installer/updater plays along with the *NIX user system, right? So what about "chmod a-w httpd.conf" for protecting your httpd settings? If you don't want your settings modified by Apple, use the power of *NIX against it!

      That won't work, as in order to update the system, you must supply the admin password. The admin [root, but not exactly] can do anything.

      • I thought root can't even write to a file that doesn't have r or w permissions?
        000 ?
        • Root can do anything; the permissions are advisory only, and can be ignored. Otherwise, that mode 000 file would become a permanently inaccessible paperweight.
          • it was my mis understanding that if you had a file 000, and you wanted to delete it, you would need to chmod it to a deleteable state.

            odd.
            kinda makes sense in the long run since the permissions aren't written to the file.
            • it was my mis understanding that if you had a file 000, and you wanted to delete it, you would need to chmod it to a deleteable state. [...]kinda makes sense in the long run since the permissions aren't written to the file.

              File metadata being written to "file" or to "directory" really doesn't matter. File permissions don't apply to root. You can make directories with 000 and still normally cd to those and use ls to list the contents. Similarly mkdir and rmdir still work fine. One thing to not is that bash doesn't want to execute files without eXecute bit even when root (I guess it's a security feature) so some bits still matter. Doing something like "cd /; chmod -R 000 *" wouldn't be wise.

  • I didn't see any of those problems. The only change I did spot was that my Input Menu had been reset: normally I have only the British layout active, so I don't see it in the menu bar; after installing 10.2.4, the US one had also been activated. A doddle to put right, but rather worrying nonetheless.

    • Re:Oddly enough (Score:4, Funny)

      by King Babar ( 19862 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:52PM (#5323338) Homepage
      A doddle to put right, but rather worrying nonetheless.

      So, am I the only one who thinks that some people in the UK must spend altogether too much time sitting around in club chairs drinking and inventing new words and idiomatic expressions that mean nothing but *sound* extremely British, and are thus adopted by the pretentious?

      • Re:Oddly enough (Score:4, Funny)

        by Slur ( 61510 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @02:07AM (#5324021) Homepage Journal
        Quite so. In fact one might say it's a rather unfortunate side-effect of being British. I would venture to say that within that milieu there are shades of subtlety that would be lost on the typical brash overstimulated American, who for the most part has no appreciation for understatement, having beaten his head against life for so long.
        • god you brits! get with the program! four words max! per sentence!
        • Quite so. In fact one might say it's a rather unfortunate side-effect of being British. I would venture to say that within that milieu there are shades of subtlety that would be lost on the typical brash overstimulated American, who for the most part has no appreciation for understatement, having beaten his head against life for so long.

          And your so-called point is what exactly? :-)

          OK, so while we're on the topic of amusing British things, I am reminded of the fact that if you want to buy up all of the works of Wendy Cope, you can finally do so from Amazon.com directly. It used to be the case that you couldn't get Cope at all from them (only from Amazon.co.uk [amazon.co.uk] or from Alibris [alibris.com] if you wanted to save money on shipping and the currency conversion.

          And, for you Philistines who don't know Wendy Cope from a Page Three Girl, just buy a copy of "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" and find out. Once upon a time, my review of this book at Amazon.com was both accurate and well-regarded:

          There once was a poet named Wendy,

          Who I desperately wish would befriend me.
          For her out-of-print rhymes
          I would give my last dimes,
          But Amazon thinks they're not trendy.

          OK, so it was well-regarded by everybody except one Brit who got his nickers in a twist over the fact that I titled my review "the most enjoyable book of English poetry ever written!". Evidently, excitement and hyperbole are not very much appreciated in England these days, where Tony Blair is apparently considered to be a pretty wild guy...

      • Re:Oddly enough (Score:4, Funny)

        by gidds ( 56397 ) <slashdot@gidd[ ]e.uk ['s.m' in gap]> on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @06:34AM (#5324708) Homepage
        [fx: Stares hard at parent message for a while]

        You're complaining about `doddle', right? (Process of elimination.) Okay, it means `something easily done or achieved'. It's a perfectly common* word round our way. Everyone happy now?

        (* in both senses)

        I tell you what: I'll start worrying about writing so that even the simplest Yank can understand me if you Yanks start writing so we can understand, all right?! (I wonder who will have to change the most there...)

        [fx: wanders off muttering about who invented the bloody language in the first place...]

        • Well...that would be the French, and the Germans, and the Latin and Spaniards, etc. If you look it up, most of the words in the English language are derived from another language.

          Of course, this only further supports your claim - if you can take words from another language and call it 'English', why not make up completely new words and say they're English, too. After all, that's what happened with the other languages once upon a time...
        • As John Cleese once said, if you hadn't forgotten to patent the language, we'd be paying England the most enormous royalties.
        • As a Yank, I appreciate the subtleties of American English and it's sub-dialects, as well as British English and it's sub-dialects. Both can make me laugh in its word usage.

          I'm still amused by a phrase I heard in London a couple of years ago, I was asked "are you in the queue for the lou". I found this usage absolutely splendid, it was much more musical than the American equivalent "are you in line for the bathroom".

          As for the 10.2.4 update, I haven't had a problem on any of my Macs (Dual G4 450 & Pismo at work, and my 12" PowerBook & Dual 1ghz at home). Icons are ok, prefs. unchanged, etc, etc.

          And even if these small items were changed for some reason or another, I can say it wouldn't really bother me, as long as everything else works.
        • Doddle is perfectly normal even for us colonials in New Zealand. That thar Yankee dog should get hisself a proper vocabulary, and get over the differences in dialect.

          Now if you were Glaswegian, that would be a problem :)
        • You're complaining about `doddle', right? (Process of elimination.) Okay, it means `something easily done or achieved'. It's a perfectly common* word round our way. Everyone happy now?

          I was perfectly happy before. I could guess the meaning from context, but I was also struck by how amusingly British the whole sentence sounded. So I made a joke.

          Laugh! It's Score: 3 funny! :-)

          Meanwhile, I did do some research on the word after posting, and found that some wags insist the term is of Scottish origin. So I was even wrong about the "English in club chairs drinking" angle, although nobody called me on it...

          [fx: wanders off muttering about who invented the bloody language in the first place...]

          Well, I'm too closely related to certain psycholinguists to stop myself from pointing out that the people who (re)invent the language are, oddly enough, our children. If only we had been able to expose our children to an unbowdlerized Harry Potter at the right age...

        • When i lived in Europe my brother was asked by a British photographer (Who happened to be photographing something in Germany) if he spoke the Queen's English. Confused as to why English would belong to the Queen, my borther relpied "No, I speak George Washington's English"

  • why does everyone jump all over upgrades? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 3-State Bit ( 225583 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:48PM (#5323319)
    software update has asked me a few times if I want 10.2.4.
    Uh, why? I have dozens of windows open, and uptime in the weeks. (This is an iBook -- are you on one? Open terminal and type 'uptime'.).

    I read over the improvements, and there's nothing I need right now.

    C'mon people. Get with BSD style.

    • Re:why does everyone jump all over upgrades? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MalleusEBHC ( 597600 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @11:20PM (#5323459)
      First, you must remember that a large majority of Mac users (usually those who were around before OS X) know little or nothing about BSD or *nix. And they shouldn't have to. The sysadmin "don't fix it unless it's broke" philosophy is not the consumer "I want the latest and greatest" philosophy. These people buy Macs so they won't have any hassles. When Software Update pops up, they just want to click install and be done with it. Most of the time, this is fine and there are no problems.

      On the other hand, you do have geeks who will take a more "wait and see" approach, many of whom have the advantage testing it on one machine before putting it on their other boxes. This is fine, but I've found that with OS X it is usually not necessary. I've tried every update on my Powerbook before throwing it on my Cube, and never have I had to wait long because there haven't been any problems. Despite the inevitable horror stories that come with each update, the grand majority of OS X users don't have any problems.

    • I agree in principle, but among the bugfixes in the 10.2.4 update were several security-related items. From http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=617 98 [apple.com] (Comments in brackets mine)

      Mac OS X 10.2.4

      • Sendmail: Fixes CAN-2002-0906 Buffer overflow in Sendmail before 8.12.5, when configured to use a custom DNS map to query TXT records, could permit a denial of service attack and possibly allow execution of arbitrary code. Mac OS X 10.2.4 contains Sendmail 8.12.6 with the SMRSH fix applied to also address CAN-2002-1165. [Not an issue for most, obviously, but, well, it's sendmail.]

      • AFP: Fixes CAN-2003-0049 "AFP login permissions for the system administrator". Provides an option whereby a system administrator may or may not be allowed to log in as a user, authenticating via their admin password. Previously, administrators could always log in as a user, authenticating via their own admin password. [I haven't seen any documentation on setting this up yet. Hrm. Hrm.]

      • Classic: Fixes CAN-2003-0088, where an attacker may change an environment variable to create arbitrary files or overwrite existing files, which could lead to obtaining elevated privileges. Credit to Dave G. from @stake, Inc. for discovering this issue. [This one can be pretty serious if you're running the classic environment in a lab setting. <insert standard physical security disclaimer here>]

      • Samba: Previous releases of Mac OS X are not vulnerable to CAN-2002-1318, an issue in Samba's length checking for encrypted password changes. Mac OS X currently uses Directory Services for authentication, and does not call the vulnerable Samba function. However, to prevent a potential future exploit via this function, the patch from Samba 2.2.7 was applied although the version of Samba was not changed for this update release. Further information is available from: http://samba.org/samba/whatsnew/samba-2.2.7.html [samba.org] [This may not have been an real issue for OS X, but it was a pain for me nevertheless. Every time our internal security scanner checked my systems, it would squawk about a high-priority security alert. That never fails to attract the attention of managers.]

      Note: To my knowledge, none of these security fixes were released prior to 10.2.4. You could fix some of them yourself, but for the general Mac audience, that's a wildly unrealistic expectation.

      ObOnTopic: I experienced the clock reset on my dualie, but NTP fixed that easily enough. In previous releases, I've had Dock items added and experienced other minor annoyances. It's never been consistent across machines, though, and since the problems were so trivial I never bothered to troubleshoot them further. Permissions issues? Files out of place? Gremlins?

  • I think it's just you. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gerardrj ( 207690 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @11:00PM (#5323360) Journal
    I keep a sparse dock of one of my logins and nothing was added to the dock. Nothing was removed or added to my normal login which has about 20 items kept on the dock.
    No new aliases were created on my desktop (Such as for mail, Internet or the like). None of my preferences were overwritten or contradicted.
    My clock stayed at the correct time and date, and my network connection stayed configured manually just the was I had it set. (then again, perhaps my time WAS messed up and the auto-time-set feature reset it before I logged in, I just don't know).

    That said, if there were going to be any inherent problems with the installer, I would likely be the one to find them. I'm running on and old Biege G3/333 that is overclocked (CPU and bus), with 3 monitors (one from internal, two from an ATI 7000/PCI), a USB/Firewire card, a SCSI card, third party everything in the system except the motherboard and power supply.
    Seems to me that if anyone's system broke as a result of the update, that there was something REALLY flakey about the config beforehand, or it is just random coincidence and they are just assigning blame where there really is none.

  • I've updated several Macs here; a Rev A iBook, a Cube, a 350Mhz Sawtooth, a Dual 500 and a Flower Power iMac. All went perfectly.

    Maybe these users are using hacks that work outside of published APIs?

    • Re:several machines, no problem (Score:4, Funny)

      by Oculus Habent ( 562837 ) <oculus.habent@g m a il.com> on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @12:52AM (#5323793) Journal
      No hacks, no unpublished APIs. The only beta SW running in OS X I have is Navigator (Chimera), Safari, and X11. I leave nearly everything where Apple put it, because it doesn't bother me to do so.

      I'm connecting with an AirPort card. I have Atlanta as the closest city. I have Time Sync and Software Update's Auto-Check disabled. I have one user, who logs in automatically. The user icon is the half of an orange. I had no Sharing services running at the time. I have a single LaserJet 4 specified in my Print Center. I have my root user enabled.

      I use Mail for mail. Address Book for addresses. iCal for a calendar. iTunes for music. Safari for web, with Chimera s backup. Sherlock for some searches, and Text Edit for most of my simple writing. I use Terminla to connect to an HP-UX box at work. I use a VPN connection with Internet Connect sometimes, but not during the update. I have primarily generic US settings.

      My Trash was empty. My battery indicator is set to Percent. I have the Day of Week showing in the Menu Clock. My sound was on. I have the Developer Tools installed, but don't really use them.

      Does it bother me that something changed? Yes. Am I worried about hosing my machine with the next update? No. Have I sworn of Macs forever? Much to Microsoft's dismay, no.

      Why me, then? I don't know. Maybe I wasn't holding my mouth right [google.com].
  • Some portion of users will have problems with any update, often for reasons unrelated to it. Watching the general flow of problem reports, this particular one seems safer than average.

    That said, I spent about an hour in single-user mode when my update got horked in the middle. The installer had been sitting there chewing cpu forever, claiming to be almost done, but making no further progress. I ktraced it, and it appeared to be endlessly looping through calling gettimeofday() as fast as it could. I did what seemed like the only thing available to me: -9'd the installer, and restarted.

    This worked out poorly.

    Panics on startup, but I was able to get into single-user mode. After a while spent dicking around with manually loading kexts and such, I finally gave up on getting networking up from there, and had a friend burn me the 10.2.4 updater on a cd, and tried to install it again.

    Unfortunately, the cli installer was choking on it, for some reason I don't understand. (It was copying parts of the installer to /tmp, but creating directories without write perms, and then failing to write things into them. I tried suspending it at the right moment and chmodding, but probably got the timing wrong.)

    I finally just dug through the package, got friendly with pax, and manually removed both the kernel extension caches; problem solved.

  • I had this problem with the dock going back to its default settings once. It happened after I woke my PowerMac from a sleep -- it hung, so i rebooted it. Upon reboot all my preference files somehow got trashed. I then deleted the plist files and repaired permissions -- things were back to normal.

    For some reason all the entries in my Address Book were recently deleted. This happened shortly after 10.2.4 was installed, but I don't know that it was correlated. Anyway, it's happened before too; I have no idea why, and I don't move the locations of my apps from their default locations.

  • It's like the Y2K bug... (Score:5, Funny)

    by wirelessbuzzers ( 552513 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @01:45AM (#5323957)
    The cause of all these problems is simple, and I'm amazed that Apple overlooked it. The new version number, 10.2.4, overruns the 11-bit signed integer field that Apple devotes to the version numbers for their operating systems. This causes the system to think it's version -10.2.4, and extrapolating on the rate of Apple software releases allows one to easily calculate the date that this release should have taken place: Version 1.0.0 in 1984 and Version 10.2.3 in 2003 gives version -10.2.4 to be precisely January 1, 1970. The 1969 dates are due to a roundoff error, and only occur in G3s without Altivec support.

    As no version earlier than OS 8 has network time support, the new "old" system does not attempt to update from a network time server. The reverted files and dock icons are simply the computer's attempt to show the files as they exist at the "current" time.

    A patch may take awhile, due to the difficulty of updating all the old system routines that use the 11-bit signed int format.
  • Okay, beige G3 rev a, no problems, iMac rev b, no problems. I'd try it on my PMac7300, but it can't run 10.2.

  • My 12 computers (Score:2, Informative)

    by mj_1903 ( 570130 )
    My 12 computers (mine and Apple store) have had no problems with the update.
  • Upgraded to 10.2.4 the other day, and it went perfectly... my httpd.conf was replaced, but that was expected. diff3 [gnu.org] is your friend and mine.
  • Installed it on my G4 Cube Thursday when it was released, and it didn't touch my dock, break the clock, or do anything else wrong. It didn't even remove my Jaguar style X from the About This Mac screen like most of the other OS X updates.
  • The only thing that I had to deal with was the fact that my Logitech mouse and keyboard preferences were reset to their factory defaults. (specifically the custom button assignments were all reset).

    I'm not sure if this is really because of the update, but I can't think of anything else that I did that might have caused it...

  • There ARE problems with this update (Score:4, Informative)

    by Nexum ( 516661 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @07:31AM (#5324894)
    Hi all,

    Firstly I have to say unfortunately there are inherent problems with this update, and the one about the clock resetting to Jan 1 1970 (plus or minus a few hours depending on your time zone) is absolutely true as I am experiencing it myself.

    It does however only seem to be affecting fual processor G4's though, so that may explain the mixed reaction.

    If you are still in doubt, check Apple's discussion board here [apple.com] where there are a total of 66 replies to my original post complaining of the clock issue (hopefully link will work, if not, check out the OSX area under discussions on Apple.com).

    It seems that a large number of people are having this trouble, and although there is no way I would ever switch to another platform after using OSX, it is disappointing that Apple allows these things through the net.

    Although OSX is vastly superior to Windows XP, I simply can't imagine MS distributing an update for Windows that would have this fundamental effect. I think that Apple should make sure they concentrate also on the mundane routine stuff in checking as well as the super-cool revolutionary stuff they are so uniquely good at (Rendezvous, Bluetooth integration, iApps etc etc).

    Here's waiting for a fix VERY soon.

    -Nex
  • I haven't updated my TiBook to 10.2.4 yet, because it works just fine the way it is. I read the changelogs for the update and determined it wouldn't be of much benefit to me, my system is in a perfect equilibrium with everything working at the moment ... and I don't want anything changing that! Strategy: Read forums, let early adopters tell you what's new in the release and what it breaks. If yours ain't broke, don't fix it.
  • According to macfixit.com [macfixit.com], many problems are avoided by doing two things:
    • Using the Combined 10.2.4 update [apple.com] downloaded directly from Apple instead of Software Update
    • Running /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility afterwards to Repair Permissions using First Aid on the boot volume
    Your mileage may vary, but it worked well for me and in general their advice is excellent.

    Also remember that in a forum such as this, the complaining voices outnumber the ones for whom the update went smoothly just because it's pretty boring to say "Hey, it went fine for me..."

  • I updated to 10.2.4 via Software Update this morning, and the only thing that happened was that I had some icons added to the dock for iTunes, iMovie, etc. I removed the icons from the dock before, since I only want the dock to show running apps, and it was no big deal to just drag the icons off the dock.

    I haven't had any time problems, no cryptic error messages, and no other problems that I'm aware of.

    Oh, I did have to move iPhoto and iMovie (which I updated via Software Update at the same time that I got 10.2.4). The updaters for them placed them in the Applications directory, and I like to keep my apps a little more organized than that. Just a simple drag and replace and everything was back to how I had it.
  • The only thing that I noticed is that my "Software Update" preferences were reset to automatically check for updates - something that I had turned off before.
    I didn't notice anyone else mentioning this (although I may have missed it).

  • 10.2.4 Problems (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think the problem pertains to dual macintosh- My 1 week old DP 867 is having a handful of problems after 2.4 fix. The computer is so new that I haven't installed much other than fink and stuff coming through apple's software updates. The problems are:

    the clock resets to 1969. (I set it to network time, and now it keeps track of the time, but even in win98 you don't have to do that)

    Sleep no longer works. it either shows garbled screen, or the monitor doesn't come up at all.

    Changes resolution on boot up. my 20" dell has no need to be in 800*600 mode.

    There is fix to this, that is to insert os x install disk and run disk utility, and it fixes everything. But after a few more bootups, it's all over there again. Now I can't really say that os x is superior to windows since it doesn't know what time it is without asking someone every time it boots up.

  • Updates always have hazards. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NtroP ( 649992 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2003 @12:39PM (#5326961)
    I run an OS X box that hosts several commercial domains and is the authoritative DNS for each. I have SQL, PHP, and a dozen other "mods" made to the systems - particularly the httpd.conf file. For the record, I know that I have made changes to the system that are bound to be blown away by an update. That's why I have a backup of all my config files. I also leave stuff where Apple puts it. That's what hard and symbolic links are for.

    This is not your mommy's OS 9 box any more kids. It's a "real" OS with serious power! You can't treat it like OS 9 or even like Windows 98. I noticed immediately that my httpd.conf file had been overwritten and simply copied it back, restarted apache and tested the rest of my system. Other than the downtime to reboot and make the .conf change I had no downtime.

    There are bound to be problems with any update. Not all installations are identical, so there are bound to be unforseen changes. I can't speak to the time problems because I use NTP. It is important that my system has the correct time - not just what my mickey mouse watch tells me.

    Overall, I'm very happy with the update - my system is as rock-solid as ever!

  • It's not whining to ask that Apple's installer be non-braindamaged and honor links and mounts. That's one of the foundational concepts of UNIX, for crying out loud: you can mount anything anywhere and it looks like it's part of a unified file system.

    For example, I ran out of space for Applications, so created an Applications partition and mounted it to /Applications. This should be TRANSPARENT to any application that rises as high as "dim-witted", much less a well-written installation program.

    I've lost track of which installers are stupid and which are not. Apple's has been, but might now work properly. I know I still get messages from some installers/updaters that the partition I'm installing to must have a System folder. Stupid.
  • From the Apple message boards:

    "WARNING: preposterous time in Real Time Clock -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!"

    I've seen this before, and my NeXT Cube and Turbocolor pizzabox are snickering to each other in the closet.

    This was a common diagnostic error in text-mode bootup on old NeXT systems with a screwed-up time in NVRAM.
  • Those looking for answers here may also want to visit the other thread [slashdot.org] on this subject.
  • Installed 10.2.4 on our G4, iBook and Titanium. All worked fine except the Titanium laptop which now drops the internet connection under sleep or closing the cover (requiring a reboot to bring back the intgernet: mail or browser connections). The iBook and G4 are fine, holding their internet (cable via wireless or direct connect) just as the Titanium did til upgrading to 10.2.4. We've reinstalled 10.2.4 and the problem persists. Is there a known BUG? Solution? Go back to 10,2.3?
    Appreciate any insight HERE!

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