Pips ‘N’ Peelings

When I hear myself asking a poor long-suffering client “have you tried turning it off and then on again?” I feel a little shudder of geeky anguish.

And yet, like asking them to check the connections, it can sometimes yield great results. I think I am going to begin a list of devices that refuse to play ball unless they are given this treatment from time to time.

Virgin Media Modem

First on the list is Virgin Media’s cable modem (255 or 256). To be fair it does say on the sticker on the modem to turn off the modem (and everything attached to it) and then turn it back on again, and connected devices sometime afterwards. A big clue if you are having internet connection problems. But you don’t immediately do that if you have been told that the problem is with something else on the network. In the case I am thinking of I was told that the problem was an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. And so it appeared to be because in the process of trying to fix it the client had totally scrambled its settings. But infact the true culprit was the modem that was not communicating with the Airport unless it was in bridge mode. The user had bypassed the Airport with a direct connection between Mac and modem, which did work, and so assumed the Airport was at fault. Well, you know what fixed it.

More to come as I meet with Macs and devices behaving in a flakey way.

Please feel free to add to the list in the comments.

I came across another photographer today with an Epson Stylus Photo R2400 that wouldn’t print from Leopard. I suspect that this problem could afflict any Epson printer installation.

Symptoms are:

1) The document to be printed appears in the printer queue but doesn’t go anywhere. Neither does it complain.

2) If you try to open Epson’s printer utility (where you would normally check ink-levels, clean the printer heads, etc) it appears briefly in the dock and then disappears.

If you get the unexpectedly quit dialog and select report to Apple, you see the error details. This time around it complained that it couldn’t find:

/Library/Printers/EPSON/CIOSupport/CIOSupport.framework/Versions/A/CIOSupport

Inspection of this location showed an alias to CIOSupport pointing nowhere.

Fortunately the client had no other printers, so despite the fact he had previously tried to install the latest driver (from here), I did the same, but before doing so removing the EPSON folder entirely to the desktop to make sure the installer created a fresh version and also removing the printer from Print and Fax set-up. I then recreated it after the installer had reinstated the EPSON folder.

That did the trick.

You have a kernel panic and the big clue you are looking for in the report back to Apple (or in the console log) is:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0×001694C6): “vm_map_unwire: entry is unwired”@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.5.20/osfmk/vm/vm_map.c:4110

Trawlled the internet and came up with 2 possibilities:

1. VMWare Fusion. OK, VMWare does some nifty things with memory.
2. Faulty RAM modules

The pointer for me was that booting in ’safe mode’ caused the Mac to start normally and to be happy for days on end; time for my client to copy over onto another Mac. So I think “Aha, some third-party software is lousing up!”. And the fact that one of the most often used is Fusion seems to be too good to be true.

Which it was. The Mac didn’t stop panicing on start-up no matter what bit of software I removed, what cache I cleared, which plist I dumped.

So I reluctantly move on to RAM. I take out a module. No panics. Put it back, take out the other module, no panics again, So I really strain the Mac with big photoshop files and opening every app in the dock. All fine. So I put the RAM back and restart. No Panics. So all I needed to have done was re-fit the RAM. Sometimes the temptation to be too clever is too much.

In this case the RAM looked fine, but must have made poor contact. It has worked fine since. First thing I’ll do next time. Apologies if it doesn’t work for you. Perhaps my internet trawl will be useful to you:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7517857&#7517857

http://macosx.com/forums/hardware-peripherals/302019-help-random-imac-aluminum-20-crashes-boot.html

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=92754

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8418392&#8418392

My MacBook Pro has been running out of space for some time and I have put off the inevitable tidy. It was down to its last 20 GB where it always starts to get into trouble. (That seems like a lot to me as I had older macs that didn’t have that in total).

Anyway time to lose some stuff, so I searched (cmd-space) for the usual culprits: .dmg, .ps files for instance but thought there must be a better approach. Hurrah, http://www.omnigroup.com are doing a public beta of omnidisksweeper, so a quick download gets me a scientific approach to finding large files. And so it does; finding that my Applications folder has ballooned to 70GB - big for a 200 GB disk. The real culprit it turns out are files in my vmware folder; 8 GB files ending .vmdk that contain backed up data used by vmware Fusion to snap the system configuration! These must be deleted from Fusion itself once the guest system has suspended. My new consolidated Fusion disk has returned 29GB to me. So I can continue not to be tidy!

I have come across a number of clients who get this message if they open Network Preferences:

“Your network settings have been changed by another application”

They click the OK button and it just keeps coming back immediately, effectively locking them out of the preference pane. It has cropped up for a lot of people, as is evidenced by threads like this one: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1715241&tstart=30 and there were a host of workarounds to try when I last tried to fix this issue. However, the most effective solution then was to do an “archive and install” of the whole OS X operating system because you can only play detective so long on someone else’s time and money.

However, when it works, the best solution I have come across is a one-click fix:
Go to the Security preference pane, and check the check-box next to “Require password to unlock each System Preferences pane”. That’s it.

I suspect it stops whatever is taking over using that extra layer of security. Which would be ironic as the consensus seems to be that it is an Apple Security Update that causes the issue.

If this works for you, please let me know!

Just a quick blogette to plead with mac users to back-up their stuff. I just came across another iMac with a disk that had suddenly become unuseable. Years of precious photos gone. I tried every disk utility I could find but no joy. If you think backing up is too much like hard work then upgrade to leopard os x 10.5 and with TimeMachine and a USB hard disk it is 2 clicks for hourly back-ups forever

OK, I know, I have more chance of selling a pension scheme.

Twice in two days I have been working with MacBook Air notebooks where the owner has not brought either the slim superdrive or the install disk it came with. I’m not going to ramble on, just to say this loud and clear:

If you are going away with your MacBook Air, do not leave the superdrive or the installer disk behind. Because if it goes wrong it will be a pig to fix without them.