Re: Looking at Macs from a PC user's perspective

In article <ULmNe.15994$xW.1243@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, TheLetterK
<theletterk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > 3) Unix "integration" in the Mac -
> > Is Unix integration all it is cracked up to be? Are there
> > _substantial_ benefits to be had with the Mac/Unix combination, versus
> > just running a seperate Unix/Linux partition on a PC?
> Absolutely. You don't have to reboot when you want to run <insert *nix
> app here>.

Aha, that is a very tangible benefit, thanks.



> Viable hardware lifespan, downtime, number of techs required
> for maintanence, etc. Macs remain viable longer, go down less often,
> and require less tech to support large numbers of them
> (Dramatically fewer, actually).

I can agree with most of that, although today's bloated and complex Mac
OS, plus the desirability to keep a lot of the app's in the same
partition as the OS, makes for a horrendously bigger partition that
needs more time consuming maintenance.

Many things can go wrong on those big partitions. I seem to be
spending a lot of my time doing routine maintenance lately.

For example, on my Pismo powerbook recently, running OS-10.4.2 in its
20-GB partition, 8.5 GBs of which is "used", with Apple's newest
Security Update-2005-007Ti version 1.1 - - - all applications running
disgustingly normally<g> - - - I decided to add the most recent update
to my "diddling" utility "TechTool Pro".

The update for TTP was version 4.0.5 - - - I added it, a cursory check
showed all my other app's to be operating okay.

It is my habit to thoroughly check almost everything after adding
updates, etc., _even_ _though_ everything seems to be running
okay.

(no "journaling" on, by the way, on my 20 GB internal drive)

So booting from an OSX external disk, I applied Disk Utility, the
"repair" feature that is like the Disk First Aid on older Mac OSs.

It basically checks the health of the file system. I think "fsck" from
Terminal does the same thing.

SURPRISE, massive failure, disk repair gave up, showed a message:
"B-tree node invalid value, can't repair"

At this stage many normal Mac users would be looking for advice, or
cussing Micromat for fielding a bad update.

However I "diddled" with the TechTool update, trying various things
like reverting to the older update version 4.0.4, and re-installing my
recent Apple security update, etc.

Initially, the only thing that actually got rid of the failure was to
rebuild the directory by using TechTool's directory rebuild utility.

That confusingly only worked temporarily, failing again if I installed
another application.


So I wasted an entire day and night trying to chase down the problem,
but I made the cardinal mistake of not recording my actions on paper.

After awhile, everything started working okay again, in fact I could
not duplicate the original failure, no matter what I did.

What happened? Who knows. Perhaps some files were permanently
damaged, and I will stumble across them later.



My whole point is, with today's massive OSs and app's, it is fairly
easy for something to go haywire, so the time we all spend on
preventative maintenance should go up.

If I had _not_ checked the file system, for certain the "massive
failure" would have caused me no end of trouble later.

One just does not ignore file system warnings in red, that say some
portion of the file system can't be repaired.<g>

What amases me is that the above described "glitches" happen so seldom.

This is the first time in many months that this sort of thing has
happened.

I have ran for literally many months on my external OS X drive, without
doing any regular maintenance on it. I am a bit more cautious with
my main internal drive, adding updates, pestering the drive partitions
with rebuilding their directories, low-level disk checking, rebuilding
"Volume Structures" and files with TechTool, even an occassional disk
defragging episode.
.

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