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Bug Businesses Apple

Panther Problem Roundup 149

Posted by pudge from the halloween-black-cats-crossing-paths-mumble-mumble dept.
An anonymous reader writes "SecureMac has posted an advisory on Mac OS X 10.3 Panther's screen lock. Apparently, to a limited degree, keys being pressed before the authentication window pops-up are sent to the currently logged-in user's environment. Note: Security Update 2003-10-28 version 1.0, which was released shortly after the advisory's release, does not fix this issue, but rather a hole in QuickTime for Java." Another anonymous reader writes "A problem with Panther has been found with external FireWire drives, that causes FireWire disk partitions in Panther above 137GB to be shown as corrupt after a reboot, in most cases being entirely unaccessible and unusable." And as a public service to all you mail rebels, I found out -- for me, anyway -- how to send email under Eudora without crashing.
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Panther Problem Roundup More

Panther Problem Roundup

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  • Other Resources (Score:5, Informative)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @01:04PM (#7339419) Homepage
    As usual, MacInTouch [macintouch.com] is doing a great job of staying on top of the issues. Also, Mac OS X Hints [macosxhints.com] has been flooded with loads of new Panther hints the past few days.

  • Roll on X.3.1 (Score:2, Informative)

    by gsdali ( 707124 )
    I'm quite happy to let others uncover the bugs first. Although so far bugs and incompatibilities seem to be thin on the ground so far.

  • uControl doesn't work (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GrumpyOldMan ( 140072 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @01:23PM (#7339616)

    The biggest problem for me is that uControl [gnufoo.org] apparently doesn't work, so I won't be able to swap control and caps-lock if I upgrade. Since my hands are hard-wired to find the control key to the left of the 'a' key, this is a showstopper for me.

    Does anybody know of any other way to swap control and capslock on an Apple Powerbook (ti, 866MHz)? Xmodmap apparently doesn't work either. This copy of panther is burning a hole in my pocket..

    • Re:uControl doesn't work (Score:4, Informative)

      by kageryu255 ( 674465 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @02:02PM (#7340015)
      Check versiontracker.com, uControl was updated a day or two ago.

      • D'oh. (Score:2, Informative)

        by kageryu255 ( 674465 )
        Said update didn't include panther compatibility.

        • Re:D'oh. (Score:2, Informative)

          by polyhue ( 38042 )
          If you check out the dev's site he said he's gonna get working on it, hasn't set up 10.3 yet. I believe some have theorized it's due to upping gcc from 3.1 to 3.3. Or something along those lines...

          It's a showstopper for me as well, but all the other problems arising are also now a showstopper. I think I'm waiting for 10.3.1.
      • Actually according to the author's home page [gnufoo.org] he has gotten the .kext to load but only the "Real function keys" feature works as yet. I am eagerly waiting the new release; I keep hitting the enter key on my Pismo expecting it to be command. :)
    • thankyou thankyou thankyou

      Stupid jobs for messing this up.
    • On a related note, it appears no longer possible to reclaim the function keys by using the old "reboot into OS9 and reset the keyboard preferences" trick. Apple seems determined that I use my function keys for such uncommon operations as adjusting my screen brightness.

      I know I'm in the minority, but I map lots of stuff to my function keys in Emacs -- and I try to have the same function key map whether I'm using Linux, Windows, or OS X. Now that's no longer possible. I'd give up Expose to get my function

  • IBook + System Load + Battery Life (Score:3, Informative)

    by krisp ( 59093 ) * on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @01:32PM (#7339721) Homepage
    Since ive installed 10.3, ive noticed my system load hovers around 2.7 and my battery life seems far reduced. In 10.2 my load was always close to 0, and my battery lasted 5 hours atleast. Now I'm lucky to get 2.5 hours.

    No major changes other than the OS upgrade have been preformed.

    Anyone else notice their battery life drop?
    • I found the opposite. My system seems to get better battery life with Panther..

      Strange.

    • Re:IBook + System Load + Battery Life (Score:5, Informative)

      by Smitty825 ( 114634 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @01:47PM (#7339873) Homepage Journal
      In the terminal, run "top -u" to see what process is taking up all the CPU time. If your processor is running at 100% for hours on end, then that's why you are getting less battery life! Panther slightly improved my battery life on my 15" AlBook.
      • What kind of battery life are you getting on your AlBook? I don't seem to get more than about 2.5 hours (with 10.2.8), which is a lot less than the rated 4.5, and that's with bluetooth and airport disabled, and the CPU in `reduced' speed mode.
        • I'm getting about ~2.5 as well on my 867 AlBook on 10.2.8, bluetooth disabled, cpu reduced, and display on a medium to low brightness. I usually have airport enabled. I'm very dissapointed with the battery life.
          • I have the same spec as you, and I can pull 5 plus hours out of the bag with panther. Try doing battery exercises, fill it, drain it, and as it is ending reduce all power usage (turn all programs off and kill the lights. Reset the PV ram and fill it up. I'm very unlucky if i dont get at least 3.5 hours with panther.
        • I get up to 3:30 on my 1.25 15" (bluetooth off, airport on and active, automatic speed setting, turn off hard drive when possible). Two things I can think of. One time I left a CD in my drive when I went to school. It would randomly spin it up for no reason, that ate battery life pretty hard. Another is, I generally turn down my brightness to about 4 bars when I'm on battery. In most environments this is fine, and it really helps battery life a lot. I think I would be seeing much closer to 2:30 if I ran at
          • Ah. The CD could be it. I leave the Black and White data CD in my drive for when I have enough free time to play it. I've also notice it spin up for no reason, but I hadn't connected that with battery drain. I can imagine that spinning a CD up and then down periodically could take a lot of power. I also tend to have my screen brightness on four bars +- the adaptation for light levels, so that's probably not it.

    • Re:IBook + System Load + Battery Life (Score:4, Informative)

      by kageryu255 ( 674465 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @02:12PM (#7340090)
      I've seen increased battery life too. Try resetting your power manager? (cmd-option-p-r on some systems, others you have to push and hold a reset button.. check apple.com/support and search for "power manager" and your laptop type)
      • This is incorrect for resetting a power manager. Command-option-P-R, held at startup through several restarts, will clear the parameter RAM.

        To reset your PMU, refer to either your manual or the Apple Knowledge Base (kbase.info.apple.com) and search for "PMU reset" and perhaps the model of your computer.
        • Actually, it is correct for some models. Yes, it is also the command for resetting parameter RAM, but it serves as both for some models. Some you have to hit a reset button, others are shift-funciton-control-power, it all varies. That's why I said to check the KB.
          • Command-option-p-r resets the power manager on the PowerBook G3 "Kanga" model. This model isn't compatible with Mac OS X, and is the first PB G3 (with a six-color Apple logo on the back of the display). For all other models, it's either a reset switch or command-shift-option-power. BIG IMPORTANT NOTE: Only the PowerBook G3 Series ("Wallstreet") uses the function key in the PMU reset; on all other models that use a keystroke, pressing function can cause problems.)

            http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artn

  • Filevault wasn't quite cooked yet (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Try this on for size.

    So I run a clean install, just to make sure there isn't any issues with backwards compatability. Get everything set up just right. Throw the switch on filevault. It takes a while to encrypt, and then seems to work just fine. I then toss a bunch of old MP3's, over 2 gigs. When I log out the next time, filevault asks me if I want to let it "reclaim space" or some such nonsense. Like a trusting fool, I say yes. Upon the next login, everything looks mysteriously like a brand new finder. Al
    • I have found FileVault to be a slowdown on my iBook. I did everything you did, except for deleting a ton of stuff. I did reclaim space, but that didn't affect me. I then decided to turn FileVault off and have had no ill effects for doing so...
    • I had the same problem with one of the betas. I started with Filevault on, thinking that I would rather have it incrementally encrypt files as I brought them into my home directory instead of waiting for it to do them all at once. It worked great for a few weeks, seemed a lot more stable then the previous build so I didn't upgrade to the next released build. Then all of a sudden I turned my computer on, tried to log in and it sat for 10 minutes doing something. Finally I got impatient, figured I had a j
    • Thats funny, it kind of reminds me of Lzip, the lossy data compression tool. http://lzip.sourceforge.net/
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Wow am I glad I didnt update yet (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nexum ( 516661 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @01:48PM (#7339882)
      Bear in mind that this is an article about problems with Panther.

      Therefore a lot of the postings here are likely to regard problematic experiences with Panther for whatever reason, and so of course Panther is going to look bad.

      Its like those people that visit the Apple support discussions forum and are like "Oh no, everybody is complaining about problems, I'm never going to upgrade now!!!", where the only reason those forums are there is for people with problems so what do you expect to see...

      The real number of peopleaffected by problems with Panther are probably miniscule, but that's not what the discussion groups and articles like this make it seem like, and unwary readers may be caught up in thinking that everyone will have these problems.

      -Nex
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Panther works just dandy on my laptop, not that I'm a power user or anything.

          BUT, I just noticed one of my iPod cables is fraying! (The cable with the "wired remote" is fraying just above the plaug that goes into the iPod.) WTF!!!

          As far as utilities and programs not working---well, (1) that's not much of a surprise, there, now is it? and (2) there are many, many, many, many more of them now than there were when 10.1 morphed into Jaguar. So I'd suspect that the vast majority of things that don't work are n

        • Re:Wow am I glad I didnt update yet (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Trillan ( 597339 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @03:43PM (#7341003) Homepage Journal
          Actually, this seems to me like a much smaller storm of problems than Jaguar introduced. I remember people really ranting at it; here, we seem to have a few problems. I haven't seen any "this is all shit, everything's broken!"-type rants yet, only "this specific thing [that I really need] doesn't work."

          • Re:Wow am I glad I didnt update yet (Score:2, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward
            You see this with every new Apple release. Most of the userbase is not very technical, so unrelated problems often get reported: "I installed Panther and my house burned down!" "My wife stopped putting out! I even Repaired Permissions!" "Worst OS Ever!"

            Which is not to say there aren't real problems.
        • I've seen no problems with 10.3 other than FileVault being slow and a co-worker's bad hard drive causing the install to crash and hosing the old Jaguar install, but that amy be a hardware issue.

          Other than that, Panther's purring like a kitten...

  • Screen goes black after install (Score:4, Informative)

    by godawful ( 84526 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @01:51PM (#7339920)
    Another problem affecting a group of users (myself included) involves Sawtooth G4's with upgraded video cards.. these shipped with ATI 128's (and 128 Pro's I think). But many users swapped those cards out for nVidia cards (GeForce 2 mx etc) as these cards could do Quartz Extreme and were relatively cheap.. unfortunately, after installing panther on these setups it wont boot anymore.

    The work are some work arounds but they all have draw backs. one fix is to remove all but 256 megs of ram from your computer.. things will return to normal then, but you'll be stuck with 256 megs of ram.. or you for some, you can copy over the old drivers from a previous version of os x, unfortunately you lose QE support then. or, the wisest, stick with 10.2 for the time being.. it remains to be seen if apple will take care of this problem.. i hope they do.

    i tried doing the 256 megs of ram thing for a couple days, but it was just too slow, so this morning i went back to 10.2

  • Some proposed new slogans (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Apple: It just works... Even when you're supposed to be logged out.

    or

    Apple: It just works... Unless you want to use your 137+ GB firewire drive and plan to reboot at some point in time.

  • 137GB is a common problem (Score:5, Informative)

    by devphil ( 51341 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @01:57PM (#7339976) Homepage


    I've learned more than I ever wanted to know about the "137GB barrier" after buying a driver larger than that and discovering the hard way that neither Linux 2.4.22, nor Win2K, nor my BIOS, were prepared to see anything larger than that number. It's definitely not a Mac-only problem.

    Basically, the standard LBA addressing mode uses 28 bits to hold an address/offset, which means you can only see 137 gigs. There are 48-bit LBA devices out there, nearly all of them PCI controller card, but support for those is either spotty or widespread, depending on which shill you talk to. I eventually got mine working under both OSes.

    Usually, however, lack of support means that the device shows up as only being 137GB, not that the partitions are corrupted. Ick.

    • Well, personally, I'm kindof looking forward to the "128 Petabyte barrier" at 48 bits.

      But, seriously, if a drive was formatted at over 137GB, and then mounted with a system that can't read that much, then, at best, there will be data that can't be accessed. At worst, the computer will try to write to that area and roll over the address and overright the start of the drive (I did this with a 3 gig drive and a 2 gig limit).
    • To bad the problem is that Panther seems to be trashing the drives so they are unusable, even when connected to non-panther machines.
    • i actually have 7 200GB drives attached to a machine running Panter. it's never had any problems with any of them.

      maybe i'm just lucky.

    • Re:137GB is a common problem (Score:4, Informative)

      by Oniros ( 53181 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @06:01PM (#7342290)
      The problem is not with any size barrier.

      Some people had the problem with 80 GB firewire drives. At the present it is not known what is causing the problem with some firewire drives. No distinct pattern as emerged as far as drive size, manifacturer, firewire chipset, etc. goes. It seems Apple is investigating the issue as some people who were affected by the problem were contacted by Apple.
      For more information on this issue, check MacFixIt:
      http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?sto ry=20031029 03070357

    • Apple is trying to get a handle on this problem - if you have a FW hard drive and have experience the bug, post it over here
      http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?13@@.599b4 a 59/84 [apple.com]

      There's a good thread over here [macnn.com] with a lot of angry people in it :) If you have a F/W hard drive, if it's at all important - I would recommend keeping it away from Panther during installation, start up or shut down, or log in. If it's really important stuff, I'd either not install Panther or keep the hard drive unplugged alto
    • On firewire drives, this is not a BIOS issue, but it is on ATA drives hooked up to many motherboards. The story with such drives is that only the DDR RAM and later Macs support drives larger than 137GB.

      BTW 137GB refers to ~137 x 10^12 bytes. The drive shows up in Disk Utility as 128GB.
    • It's not a Mac problem. You need a drive controller that supports large drives. I've owned this Mac since 2000 and I got a SIIG ATA-133 dual channel controller. OSX and the card support >137GB drives.
    • Your analysis is correct, but I wanted to point out that isn't the problem here. Remember these are external devices so the "controller" is in with the drive and shouldn't be a problem. Also, these drives were working prior to the upgrade.

      There also seems to be more than one problem. One affects the "big" drives, and another is affecting all sizes of drives.

  • Anyone find a fairly painless way to get mail.app to shut up about self-signed certs? There have been various hacks floated around here and there about how to import a self-made CA (certificate authority) cert using openssl, but what if you don't have access to that CA cert from your mail server?

    The "official" procedure from Apple in their help file is to click Show Certification button in the warning, then option-drag the icon to the desktop and install from there. But on three different machines I've tr

    • Yes, I had the hanging problem. I did something like this:

      1. Turn SSL off in prefs (unfortunately, at this point your password, and a bunch of Mail traffic, goes out in cleartext, so this procedure is kind of not so good :-( )

      *** Maybe quit Mail in here and start again? I forget :-p

      2. Turn it back on

      3. Open Activity window. My copy of Mail was going bananas trying open, close, open, close, and open various connections. Cancel everything.

      4. "Get new mail". Now you can click in the box without hanging.

      I
      • Which keychain did you add the certificate too? I was disappointed when I added the cert to my personal keychain and was still warned by Mail. But after reading this [apple.com] more closely, it seems I missed an important step. You're supposed to add it to the X509Anchors keychain when prompted. After I did this, Mail stopped complaining about my server's certificate.

        But as you mentioned, the hard part is option dragging the certificate to your Desktop, because Mail tends to lock up. One way to get the certificate f
    • Mail.app changed a few behaviours. one of which I liked the old way. it used to be that if an account was unchecked for collecting mail automatically then pressing the "get mail" button did not check this account either. Now it does check the account when you press the button. Personally I liked that since I cant "see" my external e-mail mailserver from work and I cant see my work mail server from outside. thus I just had my external e-mail server unchecked so It did not try to check it when i pressed

  • 95% of my problems went away with... (Score:5, Informative)

    by DebianDog ( 472284 ) <dan@@@danslagle...com> on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @02:07PM (#7340051) Homepage
    a good cache cleaning and a rebind. My biggest issue is no more Sorenson 3. I have put up a page on the Unofficial iMovie FAQ [danslagle.com] to help people out without having to buy Cocktail or something.

    A few tips there too ;-)
    --
    Daniel C. Slagle
    Keeper of the "Unofficial" iMovie FAQ [danslagle.com] [apple.com]
    Tell Apple how you feel about iMovie

  • I've noticed that on my 10.3 upgrade install, Japanese input is sort of flaky. I use the caps lock to switch between Japanese alphabets, and this feature often fails to work.

    Also, Safari seems to have issues sometimes when it runs into animation-heavy sites. The cursor stops updating its icon (like when you move it over a link, it doesn't change), and Safari itself has troubles going to the links you try to click on.

    One more thing (although this is just a pet peeve): when you navigate to any of the "speci
    • The issues with safari and flash are not new to panther - I get the same issue regularly on jaguar, where the cursor doesn't update properly. Occasionally, with large flash files (streaming music in particular seems to do it, like cbc radio 3 [cbcradio3.com]), Safari will unexpectedly quit.

      It makes it difficult to find easter eggs in homestarrunner [homestarrunner.com] animations without resorting to the tab key.
  • When you create an new account in mail.app and tick off ckeck for new mail (or something like that because I use a different language) Mail still checks for mail from that server. That is actually no problem when your mail is forwarded to another account you are actually checking and you just use that first account for sending mail. But my provider gives reports of how much spam and so on checked in and that is not forwarded so it always comes into my mailbox.

    Next uncool feature is the inbox collection in

    • The scroll wheel thing is easy to fix -- turn off "smooth scrolling" in the Appearance pane of the preferences.

      Sorry, I can't help with anything else.
      • :-) Thats funny. I just found that out myself when I installed another account on my machine and everything was okay with scrolling. I figured that it was smooth scrolling and yup, it works. Im wondering why they call it smooth scrolling???
  • "A problem with Panther has been found with external FireWire drives, that causes FireWire disk partitions in Panther above 137GB [128 GiB] to be shown as corrupt after a reboot, in most cases being entirely unaccessible and unusable."

    Reminds me of a problem with Final Cut Pro and Mac OS X 10.1. Random Pyro Firewire drives would have their partition tables overwritten. But then they weren't just shown as corrupt, they were corrupted.
  • Tons and tons of Panther users have found Java to be broken after upgrading. Apparently Panther incorrectly installed Java. Typing 'java -version' reports back "HotSpot at incorrect virtual address. Sharing disabled." Some reported that if they explicitly tried to use the 1.3 JVM that it all-out-crashed on them. Others just reported not being to start Java 1.4 apps.
    • I got that error when trying out creating a Swing App in Xcode, system upgraded from 10.2. Apart from that I've nad no problems.

      My one remaining post-install question is what is the @-on-a-spring icon that appears next to the trash in the Panther documentation (and on the box) am I missing something?
    • It works:

      [aragorn:~] geoffrey% java -version java version "1.4.1_01" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-99) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-27, mixed mode)

      Now, I did an upgrade (oooo...scary), not a clean install. Perhaps that has something to do with it?

    • I Panthered a PowerBook 667, an iMac 800, and a G5. Java was fine on the first two and trashed on the G5 (in exactly the same way you described). Being a new machine, I thought I'd repartition the G5 and install Panther from scratch. That solved my problem. All machines were 10.2.8 at the time of upgrade. Other than architecture, maybe the Developer tools packages differed among the machines.

    • It's the QT for Java Update that causes this (Score:4, Informative)

      by LenE ( 29922 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @12:07AM (#7344713) Homepage
      The source of this problem is also the source of the first Panther security update; namely QuickTime for Java. Those unlucky enough to update QuickTime for Java in 10.2.8, prior to upgrading to Panther, found their Java 1.4.1 frameworks hosed.

      This is being called the "69 error", as the reported version is 1.4.1_69 rather than 1.4.1_99. The unintentional proximity of releasing this QT Java update and Panther's release, and the inability to change Panther's install scripts after being burned to CD is the cause of this problem.

      I can't verify that the security update fixes this problem, but my hunch is that it does. I fixed my machine before the security update was released, and I suspect that those who claim not to have the problem are already patched with the security update, or didn't install the QT Java update prior to installing Panther. The fact that many java programs still utilize Java 1.3, which was unaffected by this problem, probably masked the symptoms from many users, leading them to believe that they were unaffected also.

      -- Len
  • My Quicksilver dual 800 G4 (installed Panther via Archive & Install) has issues waking up from sleep... probably 1 out of every 3 times I wake it up, it doesn't come back to life - the fan spins up, but that's as far as it goes. Video doesn't come alive, network doesn't come alive, and the only thing I can do is power-cycle it (thank god for journaling, eh?)

    I haven't heard anybody else report this problem, and I haven't had any problems with my 500mhz TiBook (cleanly formatted and installed Panther
    • the 10.2.8 update did that to my dual 1Ghz MDD. I think it was just a KP that happened at night as I was averaging one a day after applying the .8 patch. So if you have had alot of KP's that might be the source. I reverted to 10.2.6 and all was well and so far so good with Panther.

  • Firewire drives? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ZxCv ( 6138 ) * on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @03:56PM (#7341144) Homepage
    A problem with Panther has been found with external FireWire drives, that causes FireWire disk partitions in Panther above 137GB to be shown as corrupt after a reboot, in most cases being entirely unaccessible and unusable.

    I've been using a 160GB drive over Firewire since Jaguar. I did an "archive and install" of panther, and the same drive still works great.

    I did, however, turn the drive off while I was installing the OS. I wonder if that has anything to do with it? Or perhaps its a particular Firewire chip/controller causing the problem?
    • I have a 180gb external Firewire 400 drive that's been rebooted with Panther multiple times with no issues. Its clearly not any single factor that is causing the problems: that's what Macintouch is saying anyway.

      Its not as clear cut as it being an ATA VI problem, anyway.

  • Font Book issues (Score:3, Informative)

    by Phrogz ( 43803 ) <!@phrogz.net> on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:13PM (#7341300) Homepage
    Messing with Font Book messes up Panther. Screwed up (and eventually fixed) two machines now.
    1. Set Font Book to Copy fonts when added (rather than moving) and that Disabling a set should disable all the fonts in it.
    2. Create a new set. Disable it. (Be annoyed the Font Book makes you confirm every freaking action the first time. "Are you sure you want to turn this on? Are you sure you want to turn this off? Are you sure you know what you're doing?")
    3. Drag Adobe Font Folio (600 fonts) into the set.
    4. Reboot. Notice that it takes 5+ minutes to get past the login screen, and Mail takes 100% CPU for 15 minutes and does nothing.
    5. Be annoyed to discover that despite previous setting, fonts added to a disabled set are enabled. Select all and disable them. (Wait a long time on a Dual GHz G4.)
    6. You should now be in the same state as you started, right? Wrong.
    7. Reboot. Notice that things still go somewhat slowly, but eventually open. Sometimes apps hang and take 100% CPU trying to launch. Sometimes you force quit them and they start right up on the next launch.
    8. Look in ~/Library/Fonts and discover 2,500 files.
    9. Attempt to delete the disabled fonts. (Manually, because you can't sort by enabled/disabled.) Be really annoyed at how long it takes to update things.
    10. Find out that halfway through the deletion process, Font Book hangs. Restart. Find your fonts in a higgeldy-piggeldy state.
    11. Install Panther on a new drive, boot into that, delete Font Book prefs and manually restore all fonts to their proper initial set.
    12. Vow never to touch Font Book again until it's patched.
  • in 10.2 when you wen't to your network browser all shared systems showed up and you could mount them on your desktop, do a cmd F and search all the mounted driveso n the network.. very handy when you connect to some big drives amongst other things.

    however, in 10.3 network browsing has moved to the finder, which is very handy to just click on the network icon and all shared computers show up.. the problem begins there.. once you connect to these devices there is no way to do a network search. you can add i
  • TCP timestamp: Fixes CAN-2003-0882 where the TCP timestamp is
    initialized with a constant number. This could allow a person to
    discover how long the system has been up based upon the ID in TCP
    packets.

    Why is revealing the uptime of a system considered to be a security vulnerability?

    • Re:TCP Timestamp? (Score:5, Informative)

      by gerardrj ( 207690 ) * on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:45PM (#7341644) Journal
      Well, it can tell you several things. Those things are not very useful in themselves, but they can aid you in determining the system configuration:

      1. Server or desktop/workstation. Desktop systems are rebooted quite regularly. Servers tend to stay up for weeks to months.

      2. From the uptime you may make some inferences about the OS on the machine. A machine with a year of uptime is likely a SUN, HP, IBM, etc "big iron" machine. Basially you know it's not windows so you can skip all those attacks.

      3. If a machine isn't rebooted often, there probably isn't a monitor attached to it so no-one is looking directly at it very often. Sure there may be load monitors and such, but unless you do something harsh the extra CPU load won't get noticed. Whereas a desktop system intrusion may be noticed by the user via slow downs or "hiccups" in GUI response.

      4. If an OS constantly uses the same timestamp for TCP packets, that's a dead giveaway as to the system/OS that's running.

      Much of this comes down to "security by obscurity", which while not a viable mechinism in it's own right, is quite valuable when combined with other techniques. You want your TCP stack to give away as little information to a potential attacker as possible. The less they know, the more they have to search and the more likely you will find them before they get in the system.

  • I can confirm this bug exists in Panther. If a FW800 drive (usually an Oxford 922 controller) is plugged into a FW400 port, the drive will be irrecoverably corrupted upon reboot.

    Plugging the same FW800 drive directly into a FW800 port on the machine skirts the problem (though the damaged filesystem is still lost forever).

    Plugging FW400 into a FW400 port has no problems.

    In sum, this is specific to FW800 enclosures plugging into FW400 ports under Panther.

    cr
  • These 'people' are spreading 'information' that puts Apple and Jobs in a bad light.

    Why are they still allowed to be free?

    --
    Poll: 75% of Palestinians support Haifa restaurant attack:
  • Amazingly, even with completely new Samba and browser implementations, WINS resolved browsing on a routed network is STILL hosed. It works a little better than before. I see a few shares for a few seconds before the window goes blank and reports zero shares. I replicated the failure on three machines, then a report with Apple, including a tcpdump.

    The other big problem I have had stemmed from being short of space after doing an upgrade install. Using the new Disk Utility, I backed up my whole home directo
    • I don't think it's a buffer overflow. I believe this is the offending code:

      xnu/bsd/kern/kern_exec.c: ...
      do {
      error = copyoutstr(cp, (caddr_t)ucp,
      (unsigned)cc, &len);
      ucp += len;
      cp += len;
      nc += len;
      cc -= len;
      } while (error == ENAMETOOLONG); ...

      This code will cause the kernel go into an infinite loop if the command line is not too long but the command line plus the environment is too long. It's a cut-and-paste error, clearly (elsewhere in the code is a copyin l
  • I have a 200 gig hdrive in a granite digital firewire enclosure that saw no problems being used in panther. I'm not sure what happened to the other user, but I can confirm it did not happen with me.

    The only annoying bug I've noticed is that network locations are not saving wireless HEX keys. It's a pain to type the 20 some characters over.
    • It only happens when you leave the drive plugged in and mounted while running the installer. I of course decided to do an erase and install, so I backed up my entire internal on to my Lacie 200GB FW drive. I didn't think to unplug the drive for the install and got screwed because of it. When Panther boots into the desktop for the first time it says it can't read any volumes and asks to initialize it. Disk Utility/System Profiler can see the drive but can't read any volumes. I had no other backups. From what
      • Why do I have a feeling this is going to become the next troll? :-)

        Anyway, heaven help us all, boot into 9 and run Norton from a CD. (Don't install it....) It should be able to find the partitions by telling it to find missing volumes. Then do a repair, and everything should be intact, assuming that only the partition table was blown. If you don't have Norton, find someone who does, and hook the drive up to their machine.

        If that fixes the damage, PLEASE post here and tell everyone. If only the part

  • All I hear is whining... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jeeves99 ( 187755 ) * on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @06:17PM (#7342395)
    The ringing in my ears comes from three distinct camps.

    1. Those who are peeved that their super-specific, GUI or API-hacking freeware no longer works.

    2. Those who crammed their heads up their asses and used the "archive and install" or upgrade methods to put Panther on.

    3. Those elite few who have found a legitimate bug in panther.

    My answers are...

    1. "Umm, duh?" If the API I is no longer there, of course your freeware hack won't work. Its not apple's fault, so why blame them? We've gone through this on every major upgrade since system 6. If apple had to keep every API in each upgrade, macOSX would be as unstable as windows. Wait a week until your freeware developer updates the application to utilize the new API and then upgrade to panther. What's the problem?

    2. Apple's use of point release numbers (10.1, 10.2, 10.3) is quite misleading. All three really change a lot under the hood and as such upgrading is a really messy process. If you expect and demand a stable OS, then manually backup your data and do a clean install. This should be common practice. Sure, its convenient to upgrade, but if you are browsing slashdot, you should have enough computer savvy to do a proper clean install.

    3. Thank you for finding an error. I assume you've posted a bug report to apple? For the benefit of the rest of us, if you could post your system configuration, hardware, etc that'd be really useful for troubleshooting the problem. As always, the next point-point release (10.3.1) will solve a lot of the problems that people report.

    Shouting "apple blows b/c feature XYZ doesn't work!!" is not very helpful. You have to also include your hardware info, whether you upgraded or clean installed panther, and what third-party apps you have installed. Let's be productive people, not a bunch of whiners.
    • Some people use lots of applications to get thier work done. L O T S. reinstalling all my software would take a VERY LONG time. I am just waiting out the bugs then I will quietly, secretly purchase 10.3 and then........archive and install. SHHHHH...DONT TELL ANYONE!
      • Some people use lots of applications to get thier work done. L O T S. reinstalling all my software would take a VERY LONG time.

        I'd still suggest you to try it before passing this judgement. All my /Applications + Home fits to a 15 GB iPod, so indeed I'm not a heavy duty MacOS user, but cloning apps and my home folder via cc cloner to iPod and back + clean install of Panther took me about 2 hours. INCLUDING the worst part - thinking of what to keep and what to dump. If you are such a power user, you have
    • Those who crammed their heads up their asses and used the "archive and install" or upgrade methods to put Panther on.

      Fun fact: the version of Panther that is shipped with the Mac OS X-Up To Date program [apple.com] does not permit a clean install - only update and archive and install are possible. Thanks, Apple...

      • Fun fact: the version of Panther that is shipped with the Mac OS X-Up To Date program does not permit a clean install - only update and archive and install are possible. Thanks, Apple...

        Are you sure about that?

        Archive and Install does the same thing as an old Clean Install, with the bonus of moving your home folder + network settings for you to the new system. Old system will be in a folder called 'previous system', I believe. It has a new name but it is essentially the same thing.

      • I have that version. You are, in fact, incorrect. As long as you have a version of OSX on your drive, you can select the erase and install method at the bottom of the list of install options. It'll erase the drive and then do a clean install.

        If you accidently formatted before trying to install panther, you'll have to reinstall 10.0/.1/.2 and then try again. I did this initially, but was able to do a very basic install of jaguar in 10 minutes.

    • Archive and Install doesn't suck (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @10:17AM (#7347385)
      I agree with your post completely... with the exception of your comments about Archive and Install. This is not a head-up-ass move - it works really, really well, and is the equivalent of a clean install, without a lot of hassle. Look into it, you'll be surprised. (You do need some free room though.)

      Personally I do not consider it 'advanced' to have to wipe my drive once a year, but to each his own.

  • I've been trying to migrate from my old K6-2 Linux server box to 10.3, and one of the things the Linux box is running is Sendmail. 10.3 now uses Postfix, which is fine except that I already have a working Sendmail config which I simply want to copy over.

    For whatever reason, Sendmail won't compile in 10.3/XCode, and it gives repeated warning messages about varargs.h being deprecated and please use stdargs.h instead. My solution was simple: compile it under 10.2.

    Meanwhile, I'm waiting for Fink to be prope

    • Oh man, Postfix config is driving me nuts. I'm trying to stick with it, because it has a better reputation than Sendmail these days, but so far I'm unimpressed with anything other than the nice, simple config file. However, the behavior is baffling:

      • Mail aliases aren't being acknowledged, even though I'm using what appears [???] to be the right config line:
        alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases, netinfo:/aliases
        alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases, netinfo:/aliases
        newaliases_path = /usr/bin/newaliases

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