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My track record with system updates over a long period of time is not exactly stellar, I seem to be a bug magnet. I made this fit my world for a while by using one system as a guinea pig for new updates, always on the edge while keeping my working system a version or two back. Eventually, things changed and I've basically stuck with putting off system upgrades for as long as possible. Now I not only have my critical day to day communication applications running on my system, I also have to deal with our core systems, which are running locally so that I can respond to any kind of problem.
As usual, I put off the update (from 10.3.2 which was working just fine) until things had settled down with it and I had some time. The latter is never going to really happen but things were kind of quiet in the morning, the former seemed to be true and I wanted the security updates I'd been ignoring so I figured I'd give it a shot. Yeesh... what a pain in the ass. I'm now running 10.3.3 but I'm still waiting for the rest of the problems I'm going to encounter.
It's possible that I may be having some hardware related issues, in which case I'm completely hosed (I live on this system, a 17" aluminum PowerBook named BigAl). Part of the reason I decided to update was to see if I could make a Jabber problem go away; while I believed I was happily online using Proteus, the rest of the world has often been wondering where I was. When I'd send something, Proteus would (finally) notice that I was offline (putting up a modal dialog) and reconnect. I checked around with several other people who use Proteus 3.0.5 with our internal Jabber servers and it seemed I was alone on this one.
So... I updated to 10.3.3. Now I've got bigger problems.
After finishing the first part of the update I had no network connectivity at all. None. Three times in a row I rebooted and watched BigAl play ping pong with the Asante FriendlyNET FS5000C 5 port switch I have on my desk here at home (it never really established a connection, something I don't recall ever seeing before). It just couldn't sync and all the network related startup items were bypassed. Not good.
When I opened the Network Preferences panel in System Preferences, the Network Status selection told me that I didn't have an ethernet cable attached. Hello? I pulled the cable and plugged it back in, realized I had other options, switched to an AirPort config and back, hit 'Apply Now' (I feel like I've moved to Redmond) and it worked. OK, this is good. Let's finish the upgrade. Which I did. Download and install more components, another restart.
And again, we're hosed. What is going on here?
Try again, no change. I switched to a wireless connection and looked around, coming across this post on MacOS X Hints. Changing to a manually configured, 100baseTX, full duplex connection seemed to help. Bang, we connected. Reboot and we're back to wandering around, skipping all network related startup items.
I've been fiddling ever since.
I've seen various forum messages which indicate that newer versions of Panther don't like certain hubs. I've seen older messages that 10.3.2 and below don't like other networking gear. I've tried different ports (on the switch) and cables. I'm tired of it all.
For now, if I boot with an AirPort config at home, things respond more or less as I would expect. I can switch over later. Best guess, Apple is making some networking changes and I happened to get caught up. The next step is to bypass (or replace) the hardware, and see what happens. Since I have an extra LinkSys switch sitting around, I'll try that later and see what happens.
For now, I'm online, but only a restart away from being unable to talk to anyone.
Update: Changed the subject in horror while looking at this post to figure out what needed to be added. I really need an editor.
Posted by Dave at May 8, 2004 06:02 PM