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Panther Problem Roundup
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.
As usual, MacInTouch is doing a great job of staying on top of the issues. Also, Mac OS X Hints has been flooded with loads of new Panther hints the past few days.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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.
The biggest problem for me is that uControl 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..
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?
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. All of the files are still in the right places, but there's no connection between the application layer and the filesystem.
Filevault: It keeps files o secure, not even your applications can touch them!
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
This sig has been deprecated.
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
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
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.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
A few tips there too ;-)
--
Daniel C. Slagle
Keeper of the "Unofficial" iMovie FAQ
Tell Apple how you feel about iMovie
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 not things for Apple to worry about, and they'll just get fixed when the developers get around to it; and maybe some things *are* because of Apple bugs, but not most.
For example, someone said uControl doesn't work. Well, gosh. I sincerely hope it gets fixed soon, but is it Apple's "fault" that they changed and updated all the APIs and stuff?
Anyway, there are enough *real* bugs to go around... programs that stopped working is just a distraction.
Plus my ipod cable. Grrrrrr. Let's see if this Scotch tape can hold it together?...
zach
Said update didn't include panther compatibility.
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 "special" folders like Pictures, Movies, Documents or whatever inside your Home folder in Column view, you can't scroll to the left anymore. This is especially annoying when you're in an Open/Save dialogue.
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 for your mail server is to use openssl. Specifically:
Somewhere in all that text, you should see a -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and -----END CERTIFICATE-----. Just copy & paste everything between the two markers (including the markers) into a file with the
Though I haven't had 100% success. On one of my Macs, I found that adding the cert to X509Anchors was not listed as an option. I manually added the keychain to Keychain Access (the file is in
Try these instructions: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=255 93
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."
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?
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
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 it as a specific place to search, but it doesn't work. you must physically have the drive mounted on the desktop to be able to do a file search..
but in 10.3, while cmd k does bring up the network browser, it no longer provides you a list of shared devices on the network.. so whereas before the names were listed, you must not know the ip address of the computer you're trying to connect to.. which, for some isn't that big of a deal.. but explaining this to users here at work who haven't even mastered keyboard shortcuts is a serious problem..
now the question remains, is this a "feature" of panther? or is it a bug in pather... to me (and others) it seems like a step backwards in usability and makes panther a hard sell in some network situations.
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
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
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.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I don't see how this ever worked for you. I was never able to get Jaguar to browse across subnets. And this Apple technote says, "SMB browsing is only supported on the local subnet."
Are you authenticating against Active Directory or something?
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
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.
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.
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
Personally I do not consider it 'advanced' to have to wipe my drive once a year, but to each his own.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.