Some Sage Advice

Today I was greeted by yet another software update. I guess the programmers at Apple are working around the clock and drinking plenty of Jolt and Red Bull! This morning I was alerted to an Epson Printer Updater. If you’ve read some of my earlier posts, I had to rig up some workarounds for my Epson printer when printing to CDs. As of yesterday I had resigned myself to it never working the same way again.

So, I installed the Epson update anyway (and it didn’t even need a reboot) and I started up my Epson PrintCD software. Of course it didn’t work. But I did remember reading that with past updates, to get the Epson printer working correctly, you had to go to the File menu in PrintCD and choose “Update Printer Information.” This should take 2-3 minutes as it reads the configuration out of the printer.

Well, imagine my surprise when after the update, everything worked again! Yea Apple! So now, when I choose to print on a CD, I get all my normal printing options. Apple can check that one off the list!

Good news on the backup front as well. I upgraded my copy of Dantz Retrospect to the newest patcher. And my backup has been running without a hitch every night for the past 3 nights. I am backing up my local drives and both AFP and SMB shares on a Windows 2000 server.

So, for the time being I am placated. The normal things that I need to do with my Mac are working well. I have some minor issues with Screen Sharing that I will troubleshoot and report on later, but nothing that prevents me from working on my Mac…but I still have my entire hard drive with Tiger loaded on it sitting on my desk. Just in case.

One of the cool features of Mac OS X Leopard is Screen Sharing. Screen Sharing is just Apple’s fancy name for VNC which allows a remote user to control a local machine. For example, if someone needs help setting up a printer, you could fire up screen sharing and control that Mac without actually having to be there. This was there in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and was part of Remote Desktop and it worked pretty well. But with Leopard, it is part of the Network Browser so if you browse to a shared computer with Screen Sharing turned on, there is a big “Share Screen” button.

I use it on my home machine so I can use my IBM Thinkpad laptop to control my Mac way far away from my Mac. I wouldn’t actually want to walk all the way downstairs just to check a backup of place an image in an InDesign file. Why do that when I can remote in and control the Mac? I did run into a few glitches that were undocumented by I have found the solution! On the PC, I use the free VNC viewer called TightVNC. When I first turned on Leopard’s Screen Sharing function by checking the box in the Sharing preference, I couldn’t access the Mac. I was getting the error “No matching security types.” What Apple doesn’t tell you is that all you need is a password in your Screen Sharing setup! What a simple fix! So I put in a default password as shown below and now I can control my Mac from my PC.

If you want to enable VNC across the internet, let’s say, to control your work Mac from home, it is possible, but it requires you to open ports in your firewall. There are many security issues with doing this so I will have to cover that at another time.

It may seem like I am griping alot about how things DON’T work in Leopard. But the good news is that much of what I use my Mac for does work just fine. And while I do continue to have problems with Retrospect and my SMB shares not mounting or backing up, many older applications work just fine.

For example, I am currently woring on a document I am creating in Adobe InDesign CS2. It is working just fine along with all the fonts I have loaded in Linotype FontXplorer. I am also using Adobe Bridge CS2 to manage the images in this project and I am easily working with the images in Photoshop CS2 and then putting them back in Bridge. From Bridge, I am using a simple drag-and-drop to place the images in InDesign. Again, no problems.

Today, I also fired up Quicken 2003 to pay some bills. This worked without a hitch, although I would be surprised if it didn’t. All I use it for is simple math in the checkbook register and it isn’t too taxing to subtract $500 from $501 to get $1.00! And now that I think I got my firewire drives formatted, Time Machine is backing up my system volume. I will know in a couple of hours if it succeeded or not. Safari and Firefox also work as expected.

One notable change is the Printer Setup Utility: it is gone! To manage printers, you must now go to System Preferences and select the Printers preference and manage your printers from there. The interface looks quite different than Tiger but it works about the same.

Firewire is a protocol invented by Apple so you’d have to figure that it would work. With firewire, you are supposed to be able to daisy chain up to 127 devices, whether they are hard drives, scanners, video devices, or a mix of these. Well, things are not good in firewire-ville with Leopard. Under Tiger, I have had some problems with an Epson scanner on firewire. In certain flavors of Mac OS X 10.4.x, the Epson scanner would disappear from the firewire chain. Usually, shutting things down for 10-15 minutes and unplugging everything and plugging it back in would reset the firewire bus and everything would be happy.

That was until Leopard. I have simplified my firewire bus by eliminating most devices except for the Epson scanner, a Canopus AVDC video converter and one external firewire drive. I wanted to add a second firewire drive for Time Machine to backup onto. So I connected a known good firewire drive to the chain under Leopard (10.5.1) and immediately got an error message that the disk could not be repaired. “Simple enough,” I thought, “I will just reformat the drive under Leopard and use it for Time Machine.” So I fired up Disk Utility and hit the “Erase” button. Immediately I was greeted by an error message stating “Initialize Failed. Input/Output Error.” Thinking that perhaps the drive may have mysteriously gone bad in the 20 minutes that I hadn’t used it, I tried a second firewire drive. Reread this paragraph to learn what happened with the second drive.

So, now, either I have 2 firewire drives that have failed at the same time, or something was seriously wrong with Leopard. And, just as troubling was with the two “bad” drives on the firewire bus, the original good drive had disappeared. So I shut everything down and put it all back to the way it was. I waited 15 minutes and powered everything back on with the 2 bad drives disconnected. Everything came back the way it should!

So I took the 2 bad drives and connected them to and old PowerBook G4 running trusty, old Tiger (10.4.8) and guess what? The drives immediately mounted on the desktop ready to use! So, something is definitely broken in Leopard with regards to firewire. I initialized the firewire drives in Tiger on the Powerbook and names them something like “Time Machine 1″ and “Time Machine 2″ and then tried to reconnect them to the desktop tower running Leopard.

This time, the drives popped right up on the desktop! WHADDA??? I went into my Time Machine preferences and targeted the firewire drive for my backup and in less than 2 minutes, Time Machine was happily chugging away backing up my system.

So what did I learn in this several hour experiment (and waste of my time on a holiday weekend)? Absolutely nothing! Leopard broke firewire. And it gives me one more reason to keep an old Tiger machine around just in case I need to fix something or get something done.

This has to go down into one of the X-Files as this is too weird to be a coincidence. Just yesterday, I spent half a day at a client site troubleshooting network disconnects. The parameters are as follows: all Macs are running Tiger 10.4.8, the shared network volume is a Windows 2003 share, and the share is SMB (not Appletalk). In every case, the random disconnect happens only when a Mac user is saving a file to the shared SMB volume. Windows users are not affected.

This error had stumped me as I had never seen it before and not with such alarming regularity. Four or five Mac users were seeing this disconnect message at least once a day. Scouring the Windows logs and the Mac’s console logs didn’t reveal anything. And, the weird thing is that if the user ignored the message, eventually the file would save just fine.

Here is the message error:

Now, today, I was running my Retrospect backup (which if you read my earlier post failed to complete and locked up my Mac) and I got the same message for the first time EVER. Weird (or is it me??). In fact, my message appeared every few seconds followed by a second error which appears to be a Leopard-specific error.

So where did this come from, what is the cause, and more importantly, what is the solution? This is definitely an Apple file sharing problem that only happens with high traffic or high activity to a Windows-mounted SMB share. It doesn’t happen with Mac clients connected to Appleshare volumes (either on a Mac or Windows server) and it doesn’t happen to Windows clients.