Mika Tuupola

Note to self: always make backups. It does not help if it is only written in your TODO list.

Hard drive of my trusty old PowerBook had been giving out warnings of possible failure for a while. This week it happened. Booting up suddenly took 25 minutes. When hitting bad sector OSX retried reading broken file minute or two. Luckily with help of SuperDuper! I was able to rescue 95% of my user folder. Only thing lost were a couple of holiday pictures and two albums from iTunes.

Always make backups… Always make backups… Always make backups… Always make backups… Always make backups… Always make backups…

Because of the future changes I will most likely be traveling more than before. For the first time my trusty Powerbook will be the number one computer. Ssh over crappy GPRS connection sucks to use. Pine over IMAP using the same crappy GPRS sucks even more. I wonder if now is a good time to start using a “modern” mail client?

OS X Mail here we come…

First things first. I realised Mail did not work really well with IMAP accounts having 30k+ emails. Maybe it is the Spotlight indexing, but Mail seemed to hang a lot and had to be kill -HUP:ed a couple of times. Maybe I did not need to save all the backlogs of mailinglist I am subscribing to. If I need backlogs I can always read them at Marc. Command-a delete to all folders and we are good.

Let’s send some email then. What! No linewrapping after 76 characters! How can I send these? Ok, maybe I can trust modern email clients can dynamically adjust the text to the width of the window. It looks stuupid though.

Couple of weeks ago Apple released an AirPort Driver Update 2004-08-31. I have been running the update since and it has fixed some of the previously mentioned issues. The signal level does not jump back and forth anymore. The wireless connections seems to be stabilised and the operating system itself does not hang anymore. I still can not reconfigure the base station since the admin utility keeps crashing. I guess this is a separate issue though.

AirPort Card Update 2004-08-31 improves reliability in mixed 802.11b and 802.11g environments and is recommended for all customers with AirPort-capable computers running AirPort 3.4 and later, including AirPort 4.0.

After this update, the AirPort Driver and AirPort Extreme Driver will each be upgraded to version 3.4.3.

Thou shall not trust the automatic software updates from Apple. For several years I have been using both Graphite and Snow versions of Apple AirPort without any problems. Recently I had to do some configuration changes to the base station in order to make it work with my PlayStation 2. I fired up the Airport Admin tool and entered the password. Upon logging in the Admin Tool offered to upgrade AirPort Firmware to 4.0.8. The update went in. The BaseStation rebooted. Great, I though. Now I just continue to make the configuration changes needed for PlayStation co-operation.

Then the problems started. Everytime I try to log in the AirPort Admin utility just crashes. No error message. No nothing. It just crashes. Additionally the OSX started to randomly hang forcing me to reboot the OS. Looking at the signal strength cauge I can see the signal go up and down from zero to full even when I am standing one meter away from the base station. This also causes my PowerBook to randomly drop connection forcing me to reconnect to the network (this is if the OS did not happen to hang).

Did some Googling on this and found out others have the same problem too. The solution would be to to downgrade the firmware back to the previous version. Only problem being the fact that the Admin Utility does not work anymore. I even tried the freeware Java version which just timeouts trying to read the configuration.

So I guess I need a Windows machine to fix the problem. Too many wasted hours. So long, and thanks for all the upgrades.

OSX versions up to 10.2.7 seem to have ‘internal development feature’ of giving you the root shell by pressing holding down CTRL-C immediatly after reboot. Handy if you have lost you root password. Disaster if you are after some kind of security.

... This was originally reported to Apple in 1998, and I was informed that this was an ‘internal development feature’ that would be removed. Three years later I reported this ‘internal development feature’ again, and received no reply at all. ...