Re: Looking at Macs from a PC user's perspective
- From: TheLetterK <theletterk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 21:35:26 -0400
Mark Conrad wrote:
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,
OS X isn't overly bloated, and probably less complex than OS 9 was.
OS X performs a LOT more in the way of automated disk maintanence than OS 9 did. Very rarely should you actually need to manually perform disk maintanence.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.
Then you have something very wrong going on. What, exactly, are you doing and what's causing this to occur?
Many things can go wrong on those big partitions. I seem to be spending a lot of my time doing routine maintenance lately.
Why don't you enable journaling? There's no reason to keep it off unless your actively doing disk maintanence.
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.
Journaling will almost eliminate the need for fsck.
You might want to check the drive integrity if B-tree errors keep popping up. That is *not* a normal occurance.
SURPRISE, massive failure, disk repair gave up, showed a message: "B-tree node invalid value, can't repair"
Larger systems will generally incorporate more self-checks as well. OS X does a very good job of cleaning up after itself--and is actually a less complex design than OS 9 was.
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.
It's not normal, and not caused by OS X. That's an HFS+ failure that coudl have happened with OS 9 just as easily (perhaps more easily, since OS 9 doesn't do most of the disk maintanence or checking that OS X does). You really should consider enabling journaling, by the way.
If I had _not_ checked the file system, for certain the "massive failure" would have caused me no end of trouble later.
It's not amazing at all, it's good design at work (and your not even taking advantage of one of the technologies designed to check the types of problem you seem to be encoutnering). OS X and OS 9 are two totally different systems. Just because OS X is larger, does not nessesarily mean it's more prone to problems.
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.
You are aware that you can do more damage with over-caution than with under-caution, yes? It's a case of 'don't fix it if it's not broken'.
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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