Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update

kenthorvath was one of many readers to note that "Apple has quietly released an update for OS X Tiger. New features include a widget manager for dashboard and some 200 bug fixes and enhancements."

Comments

no zlib patch

[inio]

Incase anyone's wondering, this update doesn't seem to include a patch to zlib to fix the buffer overflow in it.

Server Update Notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Enhancements

The following items are some of the enhancements and improvements in Mac OS X Server 10.4.2 Update:

Mail Services

Upgrades SpamAssassin and ClamAV to include additional support for TNEF (winmail.dat) files and new detection mechanisms for JPEG-based exploits.
servermgrd

Addresses an issue in which Product License Keys may be reported as invalid due to case sensitivity.
Workgroup Manager

Addresses issues with the creation of custom home directories specified within a subdirectory of a sharepoint.
Addresses compatibility issues for administration of a 10.3.9 server from a 10.4 system with 10.4 admin tools.
Xgrid Admin

Addresses an issue which prevented the Xgrid Admin application from securely connecting to controllers that required Kerberos authentication.
Addresses an issue which may have prevented controllers from sending files to agents.
Improvements made for batch jobs sent through the command line.
Open Directory

Addresses an issue that prevents systems from connecting to Windows 2003 Active Directory deployments.
Addresses an issue in which systems stop authenticating through Active Directory.
Addresses an issue in which Active Directory users who are set as computer administrators may not get admin access to a computer.
Addresses an issue that prevents Mobile Accounts from authenticating with Active Directory.
Addresses an issue where the DirectoryService process may stop after waking from sleep.
Addresses an issue in which newly-created accounts may not be able to authenticate or appear in user lists.
Addresses an issue where Password Server may stop working, causing authentications to fail when replicated Password Servers are used.
Addresses an issue where kerberos authentications may fail after importing a large number of users (60,000 or more).
Apple File Services

Addresses an issue where Apple File Services may pause indefinitely after experiencing heavy loads.
Addresses an issue which prevented Apple File Services from setting inherited permissions in nested folders within shared volumes.
Addresses an issue where multiple automounts from a single client would incorrectly count against 10-client Server licenses.
Disk Imaging

Addresses an issue which may have caused failure reports when used with large volumes.
Managed Users

Addresses an issue which prevented some Login Window management options from being honored.
NFS

Addresses issues which may have caused the mountd process to crash when NFS is used to host HFS volumes.
SMB

Improves handling of workgroup and file names when connecting and copying to shared SMB volumes.
Addresses issues causing -36 connection failures when connecting to SMB shared volumes with an old keychain password.
Addresses an issue that may cause kernel panics on multiple Xsan systems when unmounting Xsan volumes.

According to new benchmarks

[HomerJ]

it is 34% more snappy, and applicaions open with 21% less DBs(dock bounces) than 10.4.1

Re:According to new benchmarks

[elbobo]

I cringe at saying it, but I *actually am* finding this one snappier. Or to be more precise, I'm finding it less memory hungry.

Widgets seem to be using up considerably less memory and running more smoothly than previously, which in turn frees up more memory for other tasks and has reduced general swapping.

Quietly?

[Raypeso]

Everytime there is a post about an apple update it always says "Quietly released". What the hell do you want Apple to do? Major newspaper headlines? Have Steve Jobs land a helicopter in your front yard to tell you the news? Christ, it's a minor update.

Re:Just got it

[Matrix9180]

did you REPORT IT? if you do report it, something more than "that iPhoto bug" would be helpful too.

Re:Wait...

[hitchhikerjim]

Apple has always done that. That's one of the main reasons I can't deploy OSX in any enterprise server environment I run. I'd like to -- but they can't figure out how to treat the OS like a real enterprise company does.

The other issue is that while they give lip-service to supporting old versions, they tend not to come out with security patches for anything but the latest version -- or 1 or 2 releases back at best. Sun, Redhat and SGI would never get away with that.

need to fix spolight too

[goombah99]

While I love being able to text search in content, spotlight is so horribly beta I'm almost at the point of disabling it. The thing keeping me from that is that I'd lose my mail search.

The problems with spolight are well known now but I'll recite them:

1) doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every document witha Q in it. You cant stop it. No hacker has yet reporeted finding where they store the default time delay so you can adjust it.

2) When you sort by date you can only sort by last access date not creation date. Worse yet, if you click on one of the items on the spotlight list (to get info on it) spotlight "touches" the document and poof it has todays date as its last viewed date. So that's totally useless and even dangerous if you are relying on it to figure out the most recent version of something you were using.

3) in the same vein, over time spotlight seems to touch all the resource or meta data forks creation dates. Or maybe not, I'm not sure. but the net effect is if you try to rsync it to another drive on a unix computer (using apple_double ) to preseve the meta data it ends up detecting that EVERY file has changed and recopies it, totally defeating the point of rsync.

4) you are supposed to be able to disable it from indexing a disk by using the "mdutil -i off "command. This only works some of the time. For example I had a two partition disk and while spotlight indexing is turned off on both, it still indexes one of them but not the other. (yes I deleted the old index). If you declare something Private it does not actually delete the index but simply does not report results for that folder. This is useless for stopping indexing on removable disks.

5) if you plug in a USB thumb driver it may decide to index it even if your just copying files off of it.

6) it's buggy. Often in Mail it fails to find content you know is present. Dont know if thats Mail, Spotlight or the API thats gummed.

7) It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4 imac. Oddly it seems somewhat closer to reasonable on a G5

8) there's no simple way to have it default to find by name. in the finder to find by name you have to do the following steps. press command-F, pull down the find-by-kind and change it to find by name, then enter the name in the test field. Dont type slowly or it finds everthing with the first letter you type while you wait for five minutes. You can try to change the default from find-by-kind to find-by-name but most (but not all!) users find this change is not sticky and it reverts to find_by-kind. (and who would want find-by-kind to be the default!)

9) find by name is insanley slow compared to say "locate" in unix. it's not a lot faster than "find" in unix. Apparently they must not have indexed their DB on the name. what were they thinking?

Re:need to fix spolight too

[jeffehobbs]

Amen to this:

doesn't let you finish typing before it searches.

That is annoying. And let me also add that, conversely, Dashboard would be far more efficient and useful if it updated itself before I press the damn Dashboard hotkey. As it is, the way Dashboard works now:

1) Hit the Dashboard hotkey.
2) Wait for all the various pieces of info to come in via the network. Keep waiting. Isn't this convenient?
3) See the info you want(ed), in roughly the same time it would have taken you to open up Safari and click a bookmark.

But the way Dashboard should work, in my opinion:

1) Dashboard gets that info for you in the background. (Dashboard occasionally updates that info, too).
2) Hitting the Dashboard hotkey shows the info you want, so you can read it in a split-second, and get on with your life.

~jeff

Re:need to fix spolight too

[drdink]

Have you reported these issues to Bugreporter? Even if you think somebody else did, the duplicate count will make it more obvious that people are annoyed by these things.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[GaryPatterson]

If Dashboard were to do that, you'd see occasional drops in system speed. These would vary from barely noticable to "what happened to my system"

When you activate it, all the processes page into memory (if they're not already there) and run their little JavaScripts. That means that there's a lot of memory/disk swapping going on, plus the network activity inherent in grabbing this sort of data.

If you're doing some intensive processing, that may cause disk thrashing as you're paging Dashboard widgets in while the app you're using gets paged out but then it grabs the CPU for a slice, requiring data to be paged back in, and so on...

I also see a brief wait before I get the data (and I'm on an iBook 1.2GHz and 1500kbps ADSL) but I prefer that to the sort of issues I'd see if I were playing a game. A solution is to activate the Dashboard for an instant, drop back into whatever you were doing, and then come back to it a few moments later. It's usually fine and everything's updated.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[GaryPatterson]

I don't want to sound like Trolly McTrollpants, but I just don't see the Spotlight speed problems.

I've got an iBook 1.2GHz, standard 60GB drive and 784MB RAM, and it's always been fast and responsive for me. My system has about 300,000 files on it, which seems like a reasonable number.

I keep hearing isolated stories like this and wondering if it's more universal or just scattered anecdotes.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[GaryPatterson]

Sounds like a common thread in your case - external drives. I haven't used SpotLight when my external 80GB drive has been connected (and wouldn't expect much difference then - it's full of large media files)

Well, good luck with it. There's not much else I can do but hope Apple improve performance on it.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[logicat2001]

The problems with spolight are well known now but I'll recite them: 1) doesn't let you finish typing before it searches...apparently it wont halt and discard the first search as you try to type...You cant stop it.

Press the ESC key.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[earthbound kid]

That erases what you've typed so far... I'd be nice to be able to pause the updating process.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[mr100percent]

I believe the Now Playing (Tivo) widget updates in the background depending on how many minutes you set it before you update, or you can have it update only when you call Dashboard.

Yes, that wait for all the other widgets is really annoying. Can't they set it to a high nice and then have them update?

Re:need to fix spolight too

[asparagus]

Re 3:

This is mainly a problem with the new resource-fork friendly rsync (I assume you're using -E). It can't/doesn't compare the resource forks, and so simply just recopies all files that include them. It's sort of the safer action (makes certain what you're syncing to matches) but, as you've found, gets quite irritating in certain instances (for example, it continually recopies my 2GB VPC image). Here's hoping they fix this in a new version.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[MagerValp]

Nope, I have the exact same problem here, and no external drives. If I (try to) search for "quicktime" it'll start chugging after "qu", and after about 30 seconds, and a bunch of useless documents containting "qu" in the list, it'll register the rest of the query. Clearly it should at least wait for 1-2 seconds of inactivity (and/or the enter key) before it starts to search.

Search results are also more or less useless, the fuzzy content search rarely returns what I expect, and often it misses content that I know is there. Something predictable like "name contains" is much more useful, but as others have noted it's impossible to change the default.

But what really blows is that they removed the file search functionality from Sherlock. It did exactly what I needed, and it did it fast.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[venicebeach]

It's actually up to the widget to turn off (or not) when Dashboard is hidden. Apple recommends that "when Dashboard is hidden, your widget should not consume any CPU time or network resources", but you can write the widgets to keep running in the background if you wish. Widgets are able to tell if the Dashboard is active or not, but the Dashboard never really quits; like the Dock, it's running even when hidden.

See the Dashboard Programming Guide.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[sg3000]

My experience has been different here.

> doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was
> supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard
> the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and
> qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing
> "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every
> document witha Q in it.

My computer is fine here. Right now, I'm trying this out:

1. command+space. Boom! Spotlight opens
2. Press q. Spotlight starts searching.
3. I can easily continue typing 'uicktime' and it works fine. The results pare down to what I'm looking for.

I confirmed that if I type Q (and just wait), I get more than 4,043 results, so I've got plenty of files to look through.

So I don't notice any performance issues with Spotlight here. It works fine for me. Maybe you've got a problem with your disk? Try running Disk First Aid or something like that.

> It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4
> imac.

It works great on my 1.5 GHz 'powerboog' and my wife's 1 GHz PowerBook.

In all, I'd hardly call Spotlight "beta". It has room for improvements, but it works great for me.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[atani]

Apple has relaxed their QA goals so much in their needless drive for questionable and poorly thought out features (Spotlight, Dashboard, etc.) that the mountain of bugs that now exist in OS X is too much for anyone not on their payroll to submit, particularly when their online bug reporter is buggy itself, totally a black box, and frankly bugs languish there for months and years with zero change and no feedback other than emails that go out around the time of major point updates stating "we think it might not happen in the new version of OS X, thank you for the $129 dollar upgrade fee"

What sucks is that I used to encourage people to check out the Macintosh platform because it was reasonably solid and I felt like folks would have a chance to discover what was good about it with minimal occurrences of bugs to scare them away; now I actually feel compelled to tell people not to bother because right now OS X 10.4.x is such a travesty.

Here's two fantastic show-stopper bugs that when working in concert would send even the most eager "Switcher" running:

• Mouse pointer disappears on main monitor
• All keyboard input other than control-keys (command, control, escape, option) is ignored.

"Yes, I realize that typing and moving the mouse doesn't actually seem to do anything; but bear with it, the Mac is really a great platform. Rather than play blind target practice, press and hold the power-button until the machine cuts power, then..."

It's a sad day when the most accurate way to describe how to reproduce a bug is:

"Install Tiger. Use it for awhile."

Crash crash crash

[alms]

I've had two hard crashes since I installed this. Hopefully it's just software and not that my iMac is dying.

Fuck. YES.

[BandwidthHog]

The hotfiles_evict thing is fucking killing me. If it weren't for the iBook, I would have had to do a clean install on the tower by now. If 10.4.2 doesn't fix it, you're gonna have (at least) one pissed off Apple Fanboy on your hands!!!1011!!

'"Do you hear me Jobs?!?!?" he cried, sloshing chardonnay(sp?) all about the joint.'

Re:Fuck. YES.

[BandwidthHog]

I typed that comment on my iBook, which is currently running 10.4.1. However, Firefox doesn't utilize the system-wide spell checking service. And I'm not at a Mac to check, but I don't think Chardonnay is in the standard dictionary, is it?

And all that aside, I was clearly being facetious... I only drink red wines.

Re:Tab Key Adopts New Function

[SonicBV]

Check in the Keyboard & Mouse system preference. Often times, I try to make a custom key command in some app, and it's already taken by something in the Full Keyboard Access list.

If that's not it, however, I'm out of ideas. Having never tried that key combination before the update (or at least I don't remember trying it), I dunno if it's new.

Re:Just got it

[Seumas]

The widget manager would be neat if I hadn't already turned my dashboard off.

Dashboard itself takes about 20MB of memory. Each widget takes at least 20MB of memory. Most people I've seen have at least a half dozen widgets going (if nothing else, the default calendar widget, a notes widget, a weather widget, calculator, countdown...)

Six widgets and dashboard will take up a good 150mb of RAM right there. I'll save my 150mb of ram and use stickies, weather.com, regular calendar and the OSX calculator instead, thanks.

Dashboard could be potentially useful, but not if it keeps sucking up the resources it currently needs. And not if all people keep making for dashboard are widgets to replicate what OSX already has readily available (why would I use a stickies/notes feature in dashboard for 20MB ram when I could use the builtin OSX stickies at 9MB?).

Working around the hotfiles_evict problem

[Jimithing DMB]

The easiest way to work around hotfiles_evict is to free up some space on the drive. The big catch is that the freespace must have a contiguous block large enough to store the file which is being evicted from the hotfiles area.

I had the hotfiles_evict problem on a G4 tower at work. The boot drive was about 98% full. After moving some files onto an external FireWire drive I got down to about 90% full. The problem remained. I then moved more stuff until I got down to about 80% full.

Between the 90 and 80 mark I also disabled journalling on the volume. This, I think, is the easiest way to fix it. Disabling journalling also disables hotfiles and therefore the update daemon will no longer try to manage the hotfiles store.

I haven't seen the problem resurface yet. Note that this was a DP G4 and so update only ate 100% of one CPU (barely noticeable). What I did notice was the fact that my boot drive suddenly had ZERO freespace because the system.log grew to about 6 GB. Yes, I know, this actually exacerbates the problem.

I can only hope that 10.4.2 fixes the issue. I'll probably re-enable journaling and see what happens.

Also, speaking of drive freespace: There is apparently a known flaw in HFS+ with respect to contiguous freespace. When allocating new space for the catalog a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace is required. If you don't have a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace then apparently there is a bug whereby 4 MB will be allocated potentially overtop another portion of the catalog or overtop some file's data. Not good. Best advice from what I've gathered is to never let a volume be more than 80% full. Ever.

Please report bugs, folks!

[JoshWurzel]

I see a lot of people complaining on a lot of forums about this bug or that bug. Not that this isn't valid, but hoping that someone from the particular group at Apple will read your post is not a good way to go about getting your problem solved.

Step 1: Go to developer.apple.com and sign up for a free (as in beer) membership (or sign up for one of the expensive memberships if you want free software, hardware discounts, etc).

Step 2: Go to bugreporter.apple.com and fill out a report. You'll have to give up some info about your system and *detailed* info about the behavior, why its wrong, and what needs to be different. And if you can isolate the problem to a particular configuration, it'll help them fix the bug faster.

These enter Apple's internal bugtracking system. Some of your complaints are duplicates of existing ones, but if enough people bitch about a particular issue then there will be more pressure to fix it.

There is no step 3! (er, profit!)

The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.

Re:Please report bugs, folks!

[MagerValp]

The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.

And until they start communicating with people who file bug reports, people are going to keep complaining in public forums. Quietly waiting for months for Apple to (maybe) release a fix in the next update is rarely an option. Bitching in forums will usually get sympathetic replies from other users suffering from the same problem, and every now and then someone has a fix or a workaround that'll work until the official patch is released.

Sun, on the other hand, handles these kinds of things in an exemplary way (assuming that you have a support contract of course). If you file a bug report, a tech will get back to you for more details. Once the bug has been confirmed by their developers, you're informed. When they have developed a fix, they send out a test patch for you to try, and you get to confirm that it solves the problem. Granted, this is not the kind of support that you can give end users, but professional admins with a support contract deserve nothing less. Oh, and if you ever restricted access to an NFS share by subnet on Solaris 8/x86, you may buy me a beer ;)

Re:Please report bugs, folks!

[TheRaven64]

until they start communicating with people who file bug reports, people are going to keep complaining in public forums.

They do communicate. I've filed bugs with Apple, had them contact me for additional information and to test fixes.

Under what conditions?

[MochaMan]

If you've experienced crashes since you installed the update, under what conditions did they happen? What were you doing at the time? What do you mean by "hard crashes"? Application crash? The Finder giving you a SPOD? Kernel panics? If it's kernel panics, what external hardware are you using? Did it happen when you plugged-in or unplugged a camera/printer/network cable?

Saying "I've had two hard crashes since I installed this" is neither informative nor useful in debugging the issue. I'd also recommend that you file a bug with Apple so they're aware of the issue. You might also get the feedback you want that'll help you decipher whether your iMac is dying or not.

My experience has been fairly decent, with Apple getting back to me within a couple days of reporting a kernel panic due to network switching from Airport to ethernet, and textual feedback on other issues.

200 bugs fixed?

[rorya]

I think the poster misunderstood. The linked page talks about the supposed 200 new features in 10.4, not bugs fixed in this update.

No problems here

[Nice2Cats]

While I love being able to text search in content, spotlight is so horribly beta I'm almost at the point of disabling it.

Little tip: Don't wait for it to finish building that list, move down to what you want immediately. Searching before you finish is a feature, not a bug, and it is brilliant. If they change it because of your post I'm going to have to find you and dunk you in onion juice or something.

Spotlight works so beautifully here that I have been telling people it is the single must-have feature with "Tiger" -- it is something that for the first time in years has actually changed the way I use the computer. For example, I don't usually even bother with the Applications folder anymore, I just hit Spotlight and type the name of the program. Works the same with any song I want to hear.

The Dashboard I could do without. Spotlight is a must-have, and I won't be using a operating system (or rather, desktop) again that doesn't have live searching.

Re:Widget "Manager"

[Biotech9]

The widget manager isn't much of a manager. All you can do is uncheck a widget to disable it. This basically just hides it from the widget dock. There is no way to move a widget from ~/Library/Widgets/ to /Library/Widgets/ and you can't delete widgets.

To delete a widget in the widget manager, click the red button to the right of the widget icon.

Yeah! It's complicated I know.

Been around since NeXT

[John Nowak]

This bug has been around since NeXTStep. It is due to issue with lookupd, which has lead many engineers to call it lockupd instead. A real pain in the ass, and one that I have no idea why they refuse to fix.

Broken: Internet Sharing over AirPort

[andy55]

At my home office and I use internet sharing to share my 17" powerbook's ethernet wire connection to a couple PCs in the office via airport/wifi. After installing 10.4.2, it's now broken--my vaio and my dell laptops can no longer connect to my powerbook's airport when encryption is on. Since security is an issue (and I can't have an unsecured network), I'm pretty much hosed (unless I want to go out and buy a wireless router). Sigh.

Andy

WPA-PSK with AES finally supported

[EchoMirage]

Apple finally fixed one of my biggest complaints with this release: as of 10.4.2, OS X now supports AES encryption for WPA-PSK (a component of WPA2), eliminating the barrier to WPA2 adoption for Mac users. Among vendors whose equipment supports WPA-PSK with AES is Linksys, Belkin, Cisco, and doubtless many others.

Three cheers for Apple!

Re:A pretty useless update.

[johnbeat]

>Still not auto-connecting to wireless networks as in 10.3.9

I realize that this is still Apple's fault, but there may be a solution; I had the same problem, until I ran across this:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?13@778.k1IL aLeWY5K.0@.68b170ea/0

Not sure if that link will continue to work, but the solution was:

"Go to the Library (on the hard drive, not the user), then Preferences and take the SystemConfiguration folder out and place it on the desktop. Then restart and set up your network preferences again."

That solved the problem for me. My computer now once again autoconnects on wakeup from sleep.

Jerry

er... FTFF?

[option8]

my pet finder bug, which has existed since 10.0 and has been reported with each major release to bugreport.apple.com is as follows. it has been marked as "duplicate" and thus closed, so i know it's been seen and i'm not the only one who's complained. but, as yet, it has not been resolved.

this is a long-standing "os X finder doesn't work like classic finder" issue, and while it's not a great hardship, it would be nice to see it fixed.

Summary:
files dragged from the finder into another application, or copied from place to place, or even file listings copied and pasted from the finder never retain the order in which they were diplayed in the finder.

Steps to Reproduce:
1 - select several files or folders in a finder window, in list mode, ordered by name. select edit->copy to copy the filenames to the clipboard.

2 - open a textedit document. paste the filenames into the document. the names will be in a different order from their positions in the finder, in a seemingly random new order.

Expected Results:
one would expect that the listing in the clipboard, and thus in the document, would reflect either a: the order in which they were selected (not the case) or b: the order in which they appear in the finder (also, not the case)

Actual Results:
for example, i've created several folders via duplication in the finder, named "copy 1" ... "copy 9"

in the finder, they appear in alphabetical order, 1-9. selecting these and copy/pasting the listing into an empty textedit document, results as such:

"copy 7
copy 4
copy 3
copy 8
copy 6
copy 5
copy 1
copy 2
copy 9"

clearly not alphabetical.

Regression:
none that i know of. selecting multiple files and opening them in their associated application opens them out of order. dragging multiple files from the finder into applications that accept dragged items imports/places them out of order, etc.