Spotlight issue in leopard

Greetings. I recently noticed that both the spotlight and the finder in Leopard CANNOT find any files in the system directory any more (e.g. plist files), even I explicitly ask the finder to search "This Mac" or ask the spotlight to index the "System Preferences". Can someone please give me a hint to solve this problem? Or simply it is just the one of Leopard's secret features??
Thx.
Vincent

Hello yun:
I experienced the same frustration. Go to the file menu>find. The drop down menu should be set to +"system files"+ and "include." This has to be set each time, as far as I have found. I trust Apple will "fix" this in the future.
Barry

Similar Messages

OS X 10.8.3, TM & Spotlight Issue

I just upgraded to OS X 10.8.3 and my TM is no longer backing up. This appears to be a Spotlight issue as all I get is Estimating Index Time when I open Spotlight. I tried the trick of making my HD private in Spotlight then public again - same result it's still estimating index time. I've read lots of posts about Spotlight being buggy after operating system upgrades although most are 1-2 years old. Anyone have a solution to this?

The pink box in #D2 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting shows how to do it on a Time Machine backup drive; use the same procedure, but apply it to your internal HD instead.
The index is normally hidden; you need to be able to see it to delete it via the Finder. Installing the Tinker Tool app via the link there is one way of making them visible.
Then locate and delete the index (but the one on your Mac's HD).
Which part of that do you need help with?

Issues installing Leopard

I have had some issues installing Leopard. I put the CD in while in Tiger I believe it was, and it came up with the screen with a big X and a button to click on to install it. It told me it needed to reboot the machine, so I let it go ahead and reboot. After the reboot it came to the gray screen with an Apple on it, and the progress meter on it that ticks around to show progress. I have left it at that screen for over 3 hours and it has made not changed. I finally just turned the machine off even though I hate having to do a hard shutdown on my computer. I then turned it back on to see what it would do, and it does the exact same thing. It stops at the progress screen and just has the progress bar spinning around.
Any suggestions as what to do or where to go with it at this point, because I can't even turn get the disc out of the machine when I first initially turn it on.
Any help would be useful.
Thanks

To eject the disk, restart your Mac while holding down the mouse button. You should then see a flashing question mark in a folder, indicating that the Mac can't find the startup disk it was set to use (in this case the Leopard installer disk), & after a few moments, a normal startup from Tiger.
If this doesn't work, restart while holding down the Option key, wait for the Mac to search for all possible startup disks, & chose your normal Tiger one from among the icons, then click the continue arrow to boot from it.
Some possible causes why the Leopard disk will not start your Mac:
1. The disk is damaged -> examine it for scratches or blemishes
2. Parameter RAM is not correctly set -> restart and immediately hold down Command-Option-P-R (4 keys), release after you hear the startup sound for the second time.
3. The DVD drive is defective -> see if it will read another DVD (not CD)
4. Your Mac has marginal RAM, good enough to run Tiger but not the Leopard installer -> run Apple hardware Test from your original Mac system disk set
NOTE: some of these steps will not work as expected if you do not use a wired, Apple branded keyboard. If you have something else, please let us know.

Spotlight issue! mdutil -i -on not working

hi there,
i have a serious spotlight issue:
all my drives/partitions beside the startup volume are not indexed/searchable
when i check with mdutil -s it tells me "indexing disabled"
however if try mdutil -i -on /Volumes/the_disk t does not work
also mdutil -a -i on does not enable indexing.
and yes, i ran the commands as su.
what is going on and more importantly:
wtfigo?

hey e.blofeld!
i have the same problem (since weeks) and no idea how to solve it.
i hope you could solve the spotlight issue. if yes, please let me know how, because it makes me nuts.
greets

Spotlight issue -- preferences ignored

Hi, I have another issue that can be added to the growing list of spotlight issues:
I UNCHECK "mail messages" in the list of files types under "search results" preferences for spotlight, and these still show up in my search results.
Also, when I select the order of files types, it is ignored in the window with results that pops up after choosing showa all...
Any ideas what is going on?
Thanks,
Artur

I actually meant the folder where most preferences are usually stored for the user--the one in the "hard drive>users>user>library>preferences" folder
But it should work for the system-level preference folder as well!
However, I just noticed this: You can search for preference files in the enclosing "library" folder's search window as well, so apparently you don't need to go down to the "preference" folder directory!
I still don't know why you can't search for preferences at the highest level--why do we have to drill down to a "library" window to search for preference files?

Various issues since Leopard upgrade

I have just installed Leopard on a Dual 2.7 G5 with a 500GB Hitachi HDD and 5GB RAM and I have noticed one or two niggling little 'quirks' (I am lumping everything together here, rather than separating them in to more appropriate sections, so that I have a record of everything together).
1) I have an Epson Perfection 4870 scanner which I cannot use to scan directly from applications (for quickness I mainly use Preview) as the 'scan' button is always unavailable (greyed out, not highlighted in blue). This has been an issue since at least 10.4.8, so it's not a problem exclusive to Leopard, but it's extremely annoying nonetheless. As I can scan directly from the Epson Scan software (which is basically the driver) Epson will not assist me further and have directed me to Apple/Adobe/MS, etc., for support. Prior to 10.4.8 (IIRC) I could select 'import' (from whatever application) and it would automatically preview, the scan button would then become available and hitting it would launch the driver software. However, the link between the applications and the driver seems to have been severed somehow/somewhere and it is no longer recognising that the unit has finished its preview in order to make the 'scan' button available for the next part of the process.
In Tiger, I could also scan into Epson's EasyScan application, but have been told this isn't 10.5 compatible.
Does the above make sense...? Has anyone else experienced this - and have you solved it? If so, how?
2) This next bit concerns the Dock. I like to have it hidden along the left hand side of the screen, rather than at the bottom, because I only have a 17" panel and desktop space is at a premium. However, about one restart in five, it's back along the bottom and any icons or folders that I have added to it have gone AWOL.
3) The third issue is a sound issue. I have a Revolution 7.1 card which I understand, from reading a notice on M-Audio's Web site, is not yet Leopard compatible (though the promise it will be "very soon"' though as the last driver release didn't support anything newer than 10.4.6, IIRC, I'm not holding my breath!)
So I have removed the card and plugged my Logitech Z5500s back into the 'on board' card. This was working flawlessly under Tiger (I know because I tested it to make sure, because I knew that the Revolution wouldn't function under Leopard). However, whatever I try, I only seem to hear sound from the internal speaker; I even replaced the optical cable (at great expense - the original was a Belkin Gold Series, and so is the replacement and, at about £35 a pop, it's not a trivial outlay). Everything in the sound sys prefs is completely 'greyed out' so I cannot change it from the internal speaker to anything else. Whilst there is nothing on Logitech's Web site as regards to the Leopard compatibility of any of its products (it seems that it gave up on the Mac a very long time ago; I use a MX510 which was the last of their rodents to have any kind of OS X support and that stopped with 10.4.4, IIRC) I cannot see how a set of speakers, which should work with anything that has the required jack sockets, can be fussy about an OS. Incidentally, I also have a 'dark side' box running XP Home (when I win the lottery, I'll buy a Mac Pro and dispense with it) and they're plugged in there and work fine (via analogue, though, not digital).
I noticed it when I received some CDs that I'd ordered from Amazon the other day and found that iTunes was playing through the internal speaker.
4) The final issue is a networking issue. Under Tiger, I could (though it did take me some tweaking to get it working smoothly) dump things from the G5 on to the Windoze box and vice versa, without too many hiccups. However, Leopard is proving to be somewhat of a challenge, to say the least. I don't know how I managed it, but I did manage to render the machine completely inoperable at one point (it would only boot as far as the grey 'Apple logo' screen and I couldn't open the optical drive to stick the DVD in - a panicked phone call to a friend, who runs his own Mac repair and consultancy business, followed!
I don't understand SMB and AFP (though I do know about FTP). In the Finder, I can see the 'doze box and can send things to it (though should I be connected as 'guest'?) but there is nothing on the Windoze side, save for 'Printers and Faxes'). I have made sure I have permissions set correctly and everything is set up to share (and Windows sharing is on) but there is nothing on the other box at all.
Is it possible to share the main HDD across, or am I limited to this silly 'Drop Box' thing (which I did have available under 'doze at one point, though it was read only and I couldn't change permissions from Leopard because I didn't have sufficient privileges, even though I have an admin account and I could change permissions under Tiger with the same level of 'clearance'.)
4) This final issue is sort of linked with 3) as it concerns what I believe to be erroneous error messages. I was clearing some stuff off a drive I was going to use for Time Machine[1], but I wasn't allowed to delete most of it because 'XYZ was in use' or open in an application. Six reboots later, I was still receiving the same error; strikes me that Leopard's got its knickers in a knot somewhere along the line because the files in question (mainly old Word and Excel docs) were certainly NOT in use as I didn't have either installed at the time!
[1]Though having read the problems people are having with TM (not just here, but on other forums I read/post to) I think I might give it a miss and stick with ChronoSync (just have to wait for it to be compatible).
So, this is actually the second installation, but the problems remain - any help out there?
Sorry for the verboseness of this, but I wanted to make sure that I'd covered everything. I'm almost tempted to reinstall Tigger (but not quite - I like Spaces, and I like the Dock Preview).
Cheers for any assistance, folks!
Fran

Fran, I'm not sure I'm going to be much help for all your problems but I will attempt to answer what I can.
1. Scanner problems - have you tried reinstalling the software? I know you mentioned that the easyscan software is not compatible but it sounds like the driver software isn't in the right place. Optionally another program that you might want to look into is vuescan. I have had good success with the program in the past but I have yet to try it under Leopard.
2. Dock problems this sounds like either a corrupted preference list. But I don't have a clue as to why it might be reoccurring. Have you fixed permissions on your computer since installation?
3. I don't have a clue to figure out how to fix this issue.
4. Networking - As for sending things to the doze box. You don't need to be connected as guest. Just use the username and password that you use when you sign into the windows to sign into the windows box and you should have the same rights as you would as if you were using windows on that computer. Yes it is possible to share the main HDD but it isn't something that I would recommend. What I do recommend is creating a folder where you have both read and write rights to and then use that folder share items across both computers. If this isn't something that is going to work for then at the most I would just share your documents folder. You didn't mention how your trying view information on the windows side you should be able to browse your network and eventually find and see the mac.
4 (part 2) - I would recommend something besides TM, it is designed to recover lost/accidentally deleted files. And isn't really designed for being your complete backup program. Yes, you can use it for that but I would recommend something more robust. Some of that comes down to how you want to define your recovery strategy. Superduper!, promotes themselves as having the ability to boot for your backup drive and being able to almost immediately get back in business. If this is a critical factor to you then I would lean in that direction. If you are just worried about having a backup of critical data files then Chronosync or some other program will work just as well. Also mentioned in your post in this paragraph is a description of "files in use" problems. A couple of things come to mind did you let spotlight finish indexing your drive before you tried deleting files? I've run into a problem similar to this in Tiger when I was deleting files while spotlight was indexing.
One item that you didn't mention was what kind of installation you did when you installed Leopard. If you didn't do an 'erase and install" then that might be something to look into. First back up your computer before doing this. You might also want to run a permissions fix on your drive to see if that helps at all.
HTH
Paul

Spotlight Issues

Hey I am having an issue with spotlight on a network at home before i tiger I use to be able to explore network drives using spotlight. The network drive is on another computer in the office which use to work fine before upgrading to Leopard. Main Question*+ When I open up one of the external drives attached to another co-workers computer from my computer and use the search function it says "searching "This Mac"". And nothing ever opens

I have a similar, but slightly more annoying issue.
Every once in a while (seemingly at random), Spotlight decides that all my drives need to be indexed again (not just when I restart). I have an internal 250GB, an external Firewire 250GB, an external USB 250GB and a 500GB USB that is used for my Time Machine.
Anyway, about two or three minutes into Spotlight indexing these drives, I get a Kernel Panic and have to restart. To prevent this, as soon as Spotlight starts indexing I have to quickly throw all drives into the Privacy area to stop them from being indexed, and then release them one by one back to Spotlight to be indexed. This takes really long and is very annoying.
One other, possibly related issue, is that Spotlight doesn't work under Time Machine. Whenever I use Time Machine, no matter what I put in the search window, it returns no results.
Any ideas anyone?
Thanks,
Paul C.
Message was edited by: unicorn27

Spotlight behavior in Leopard

Can someone explain this to me:
If you create a folder in Leopard on the desktop and call it "12345678" and then search for 2345678 in Spotlight, why doesn't the folder appear in the search results? This worked in Tiger. It worked in Win95 for that matter.
Now for the kicker: Search for 12345 and your folder will appear, as if by magic. This one simple exercise tells me that I can't trust Spotlight searches at ALL right now.
I've read that Leopard ignores file names that it doesn't think are important in search results. It uses some kind of "logic" to return "smart" results and keep you from being overwhelmed by the search results. Believe me, I'm not overwhelmed by Zero Results. I'm decidedly underwhelmed.
I can do this same experiment with my macbook and 10.4 and the folder shows up no matter which parts of the file I am searching for.
Yes, I know you can hit the "plus" button in the search window and go in and force it to search "filename" and "contains" instead of the default(!) "begins" but that is probably a 15 second process every time, because the "save" option for the searches doesn't work with file open/save dialog boxes when you use spotlight within them. Big Fat Bummer.
I have about 10000 SKUs in our product catalog that I need to pull images for all the time. They are named by UPC and most of them have the same first 4-5 digits because they are part of the same product classification. That means that in Tiger I can search for the last 4-5 digits of the UPC and get a result. In Leopard, that same approach returns zero files. I am very sad. Am I missing something? I've looked all over for a preference that I can change to force Spotlight to always show me ALL results, no matter how irrelevant it thinks they may be. Is there a script that will troll through an entire folder and put a copy of the file name into the "comments" field so that Spotlight will pay attention? Is this really, truly not considered a bug? It's so difficult to work around this problem that I've resorted to using an FTP client (Transmit) and connecting to my OWN machine as if it were an FTP server, because Transmit will search based on file names (and only based on file names, as it happens). It will get me results faster than using Spotlight. On my local drives. Is this thing on? Anybody home? Hello?

First off, I'm not suggesting that the Spotlight interface (especially the GUI portions) isn't frustrating to use and buggy. Nor am I suggesting that using the command line is the right way to do it or necessarily easier (I know that for most people it is not).
However, since I do spend a lot of time with a command line shell open, I feel I should at least mention the "mdfind" utility. In my experience, this utility is extremely accurate returning results. It doesn't feel like there's any sort of governor on it, like with the GUI interfaces, which can be both good and bad I suppose. With a properly formed search string, mdfind can be very powerful. And, since it's a command line utility, you can combine it with some other Unix tools like "grep" or "xargs" to do some really cools stuff.
In your example, with a folder named "12345678", I can run this query from the command line:
% mdfind "kMDItemFSName = *45678"
and find that folder. I could also do this
% mdfind "kMDItemFSName = \*45678 || kMDItemFSName = 87655\*"
to find that folder or a folder named 87654321. There's also time based searching, less than/greater than comparisons, inequality comparisons, etc. Granted, it takes a little bit to familiarize yourself with the metadata attribute names, but there's only a handful that are typically useful so it's not that much of an issue (IMO). Run "mdls" on a file to see the attribute names.
Since mdfind is searching the central metadata store, it's also pretty quick. Even though some of the other apps mentioned are multi-threaded, they still have to traverse the file trees looking for matches...
Hope this helps.
Message was edited by: glsmith

Graphic Issues with Leopard - iMac 24" White GeForce 7300 GT

Upon installing Leopard, I've noticed several graphics issues and general lag and delayed response with the interface. I'm running a 24" iMac 2.16ghz White early 2007, 3gb of RAM, with the GeForce 7300GT card. I have Time Machine disabled, and Spotlight has fully indexed.
When installing Leopard, I did an "Erase and Install" and have manually installed my Applications after the Leopard install. I'm using only a few applications that are all "Leopard ready" and have a relatively clean system at this point. I have also cleaned the PRAM, per the recommendations in some of the threads ive read, which didn't seem to correct the issue in this case.
It seems that any time I run any type of video or graphical application, such as Photo Booth, World of Warcraft, iChat, etc, I get a large amount of lag and slow response with the interface. Windows respond very slowly, and the applications freeze for 15-20 seconds. Even when not engaging any applications, opening folders in the finder as well as the dock appear to stall and respond very slowly.
Aside from these issues, Leopard has performed very well and I have had no other issues. Quicklook and coverflow all seem to respond very quickly and smoothly. My guess is that it may be driver related as it seems to be centered around items that are engaging the video card, though it is strange how some graphical effects seem to work smoothly while others are rather choppy. I have been watching the Activity Monitor and there don't appear to be any processes that are sucking up CPU, and nothing obvious that may be reducing performance.
I'm just curious if anyone else has noticed anything similar to this on similar hardware, or possibly may know what the culprit could be. My best guess, again, is that it could be the drivers or firmware with this specific hardware that I'm using.
Thanks for your time

I've had the same graphics issues with my white iMac 24 (serial no starts W8638), but with the GeForce 7600 card. AppleCare got me to do all the usual stuff (reset PRAM, clean Leopard install etc) but problems continued. The usual pattern is that after a while horizontal lines appear (usually in Safari) and things deteriorate form then on until there is so much pixellation that I have to turn off and back on.
Yesterday I ran for several hours using SMCFanControl to set the fans to max and had no problems, so my suspicion is that the additional graphics requirements of Leopard are over-heating the graphics card or logic board.
The Apple engineer took the machine away today and said they'll probably replace the logic board and graphics card (I think they can't change one without the other in the iMac?).
Will be a few days but I'll report back on what repairs they make and whether they solve the problem. My fear is that any changes they make will have no effect if its a design problem and the card is just not up to the job without over-heating. Though it could be the card just needs a good clean
Has anyone else tried increasing fan speed?

Importation doesn't work when use spotlight on snow leopard.

Hello,
I've a little problem with AE CS4. I upgrade to Snow leopard, and now, when I want to import something (music, video or something else) with the spotlight search (in the importation windows) AE crash....
So if I want to import something I've to select manually each files...
Do you know how to fix this ?
Thanks.

Hi,
Thanks for mentioning this issue. If you remember, dropping a line to [email protected] a pretty reliable way to report bugs (but not get support).
I couldn't see any obvious workaround for you to use oothen than just avoiding the problem.
As usual, I can't comment on future releases.
--chris

Lion spotlight issues

Hi,
I've seen a few related issues in the forums. Here's my problem:
I have a MacBook with 3 partitions. One partition has Lion, one has Snow Leopard, one has Leopard. I need it like this for certain reasons and normally all works fine. But everytime I boot into another partition and come back to Lion it starts reindexing for about 10-15 minutes and slows the computer down significantly. In my Lion partition I have the other 2 partitions added to the privacy tab in Spotlight prefs so it shouldn't matter what changes I make in those partitions right? I have read some posts about Lion reindexing the entire drive after booting up but I don't think it's that extreme for me since it would take hours to reindex the entire drive and my slowdown is about 10 - 15 minutes. I have tried to rebuild my Spotlight index and redo the privacy tab and so far same results. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
rc

You didn't mention if you disabled the Lion partition in Spotlight whe using SL or Leopard. That should be why the re-indexing occurs when in Lion. The Lion filesystem gets modified by the other two OS X versions.

Solutions to Some DNS, OD, AFP, CalDAV, AFP, and Spotlight Issues

I recently upgraded our aging Xserve (1.3GHz G4, yeah baby!) to Leopard Server from Tiger Server so everything in the office would all be on the same OS. This server hosts all our in-use files via an Xserve RAID, and our dead files are on the internal 3-disk striped array. It's also the Open Directory master and hosts the office's DNS (I wanted to put OD and DNS on the new Xeon Xserve that hosts our FileMaker database, Retrospect backup, and our Squid web proxy, but something in its DNS configuration is broken and I gave up on that since OD and DNS don't really put any additional stress on the G4). Anyway, with all the hoopla of configuring, reconfiguring, and fixing, I've learned some things that may help others.
*DNS, Open Directory, and AFP*
I had some trouble with groups and ACL permissions, inability to get CalDAV working, and general strangeness with OD and Workgroup Manager. Demoting the server from an OD master to standalone took care of most of these. Part of the problem was an incorrect LDAP search base, which can only be corrected by blowing away the OD master and making sure DNS is set up properly. We only have about 20 users (we don't host network homes or anything like that), so when I did the demotion I just let it destroy all the accounts, and after promoting the server back to an OD master, I recreated the users and groups from scratch. So with freshly created users and groups, and after resetting the ACL's and propagating permissions on the network shares, that cleared up the permissions problems. The corrected LDAP search base fixed the Directory application too, which wasn't showing any contacts before, and it got Kerberos working as well.
iCal/CalDAV
All this work also got CalDAV/iCal calendar sharing running, and when I enable calendaring for a user, it stays enabled in WGM. Before, whenever I'd switch to another user and come back, calendaring would be turned off in WGM, although it was in fact still enabled. I haven't tested calendaring much yet, and adding an account in iCal is still a bit flakey. Our DNS is just internal, so in Server Admin I un-checked "fully-qualified" for our few DNS hostnames. If I mark the server's DNS hostname as fully-qualified, auto-discovery of the address in iCal won't work. iCal rejects my passwords if Kerberos authentication is used in either case, even if I manually point it to the IP address, but it connects fine without Kerberos.
*Spotlight and AFP*
Another problem I had after upgrading the server was stale spotlight searches. I used Server Admin to turn spotlight searching on and off for the two shares, and I tried any number of mdutil commands and System Preferences "privacy" settings to turn indexing on and off and to rebuild the indexes. With the old machine and about a terabyte of data, indexing would take all night, so I couldn't really try a lot of things. Every time the index was rebuilt, it would propagate out to the office just fine, but it would never update from then on. The solution to that was changing the permissions on the volumes the shares are on. The shares themselves had the correct permissions and ACL's, but the volumes need their POSIX permissions set to:
owner: root: read/write/execute
group: admin: read/write/execute
everyone: read/execute
Over the years those permissions had been changed (this server started out with OS X 10.2 Server btw, so there's been plenty of time for things to get b0rked), but Tiger Server apparently didn't care. Another thing I did (although I'm not sure if this was necessary) was to change the "Others" POSIX permission from None to Read Only. Once all that was changed, mdworker started chugging along to keep the spotlight index updated. However, it went nuts after the 10.5.6 Server update, constantly working with no sign of ever finishing. The update notes do make specific mention to Spotlight changes, which says you have to disable spotlight indexing for any shares in Server Admin, then re-enabled it to "take advantage of the new features." That started another night of indexing, but it's now done and updating properly. I noticed that a new inherited ACL for the user "Spotlight" showed up at the root level of each share point. I'm not going to touch that.
I'll admit that I hate spotlight's interface and lack of control in Leopard (i.e. it always resets your search parameters, you can't change the results window's columns, and you have to already be in the folder you want to search, etc.). That being said, I can search for anything on the server and it finds the results almost instantly. Even a search that returns "more than 10,000" results only takes about 5 seconds. With Tiger or Panther server, ANY search would take several minutes and grind the server to a halt, making anyone else who tried to save a file or navigate the shared volumes get the spinning beach ball.
Hopefully this will be of help to someone.

Hi.
You've not outlined your issues with AFP per se, having any ?
DNS is critical for OS X Server, it's appropriately finicky about working forward & reverse DNS lookup for its FQDN.
Certainly, Leopard Server may make assumptions contrary to your intent, if using the non-advanced setups, as it will attempt to use DNS and if not available, this may result in settings other than you desire.
By default, hostnames entered in the Server Admin DNS settings, will be considered as part of the DNS zone you're editing.
So:
server
would be for: server.yourfqdn.com
If you mark that as fully qualified, well, then it's looking for: server
which is not a FQDN
As well, I believe Apple states it should no longer be necessary, but if you do need to change the hostname for your OD master, it is often possible via the Termina/command-line via:
(sudo) changeip
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man8/changeip .8.html

Multiple issues with Leopard (Network, Pages, iPhoto, iTunes, General)

It's been so much fun.
I have 3 macs right now, per my profile.
I started updating the G4 because it's the experimental system, the MacPro is production, and the MacBook is for the kids and for me to wander the domain and still be productive. These Macs and some other things sit behind a Linux/iptables firewall.
1st issue: After updating the G4 certain web sites have been inaccessible, including just about any apple sites behind SSL, ADC, iTunes Music Store, iPhoto Store (calendars, books), Network Solutions, Newegg, etc. However, as of 10.4.11 on the other 2 Macs, 10.5.1 and 10.4.11 had parity, or close to it, in networking.
2nd issue: The other problem I had right off the bat was remote printing to the MacPro which has an Epson Stylus Photo printer hooked up. At the time this was first noticed, the MacPro was 10.4.11 and the computer I was attempting to print from was 10.5.1. I erroneously thought that had to do with the disparity on OS versions. Not so. The result of trying to print anything to the remote printer is the immediate cratering of the app you're printing from, Safari, Pages, Firefox, Preview. I can reproduce this at will.
3rd issue: Straight from the previous 2 issues, I can't log any problem reports. This is frustrating.
I initially didn't see the problems that I saw a lot of people registering on here, other than the ones I noted above, and as far as the networking thing went, 10.4.11 and 10.5.1 were equally cr*y. So, I bit the bullet and upgraded several things, iLife '08 (which I couldn't adequately check out on the G4), iWork '08 which I hadn't had any problems with, and Leopard on the remain 2 macs.
Issue 1 was, as expected, no better or worse, and more and more talked about on these discussions. I thing that helped, notably to allow me to finally login to the discussions, rather than just read them, was:
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.pathmtudiscovery=0
Thanks to mreckhof for that little gem
This helped with the login here, but didn't help with anything else. And in retrospect, 10.5.1 is much worse then 10.4.1 as far as the networking goes. When/if I expose the mac by putting it outside the firewall, it's actually much much worse than it used to be. There are several places where any of the Macs directly connected to the internet are completely useless for talking to websites, DNS, and other things. The web site problem is that more than a handful don't load. Most of these make heavy use of akamai, as apple does. The Linux Firewall and exposed Linux desktops don't have this problem.
Right now, I can't buy or use a few of the bought things from iTunes Music Store. I could not order calendars from iPhoto, which shot holes in several of our holiday gifts to friends and relatives. I can't purchase or update several things with other online vendors from the mac, where I would usually do such things. There is a veritable litany of things, real monetary that I also can't do to earn money as well now that we've upgraded, but I'll get to that.
Issue 2 and issue 3 were unchanged.
4th Issue: iPhoto lost, on import, several photos and movies. This happened just recently. Currently the iPhoto library has around 30,000 photos and videos in it spanning the last several years. it's around 500GB. The problem was that after the import was "done" and it was cleaning off the memory card, it crashed. The imported items were not successfully imported, that I can find, and the memory card was successfully cleaned off. The images and movies appear to be lost completely. The problem is that we derive some of our income from the picture. There backed up in 2 different ways, but we have to be able to trust that they'll arrive safely for the backup to work. I'm rethinking that. I can't trust I photo so memory cards are filling up.
But I thought we still could do things with iPhoto with what is there. Woe is me.
Issue 5: Using Pages 3.0.1, and dragging photos from iPhoto to it, something that has brought good success in the past, and produced some great results, stopped working reliably, in a big way.
The document in question is about 80 pages long and contains a couple hundred photos, dragged and dropped from iPhoto. On or around page 62, Pages started throwing up a "Image file ****.jpg is corrupt and cannot be used, all other photos already imported blah, blah, blah." I'm paraphrasing at the moment because 1) Pages crashes, when you're lucky, soon after this and 2) when you're not lucky, the whole computer freezes in a non-recoverable way. The system log is littered with:
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] Pages(173,0xa0748f60) malloc: * mmap(size=3051520) failed (error code=12)
* error: can't allocate region
* set a breakpoint in mallocerrorbreak to debug
2008/01/07 23:00:16 Pages[173] CGContextSetShouldSmoothFonts: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextConcatCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextConcatCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextSetFlatness: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextRestoreGState: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextScaleCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextClearRect: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextSetLineCap: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextAddLineToPoint: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGBitmapContextInfoCreate: unable to allocate 3047424 bytes for bitmap data
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextTranslateCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextSaveGState: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextSetFlatness: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextRestoreGState: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextScaleCTM: invalid context
2008/01/07 23:00:17 Pages[173] CGContextClearRect: invalid context
There were around 100 instance of the above error in at the same timestamp.
I'm not sure where it's trying to malloc this from, but the machine has 8GB of physical ram and plenty of space for swap. It normally reports 34GB of VM and when pages is started, 6+GB of real ram is available to it.
And the image isn't corrupt. I'm able to start a fresh document up and put a few pictures into it.
I am unable to cut and paste, use the media browser or otherwise to add more than an image at a time into the document. The same is, I still have the old pages around, and we had done a very similar thing with it, several times, but this one was started with 3.0.1 and saved as a 3.0.1 document. The amount of time put into it, at this point, is non-trivial.
When things go very badly, iPhoto and Pages conspire together to lock the computer up wholly and completely. I'm unable to kill Pages, at all, from the command line. I have been able to kill iPhoto from the command line, but it doesn't change anything, and I really hate to do it. If I issue a shutdown from the command line, it doesn't something is preventing us from getting a clean shutdown.
And I've had varying degrees of success registering my products, but they're all recent purchases and I've got serial numbers that appear to all them to work even if I'm unable to send in the registration over the internet. They're family versions.
Issue 6: Now that frequent hard restarts, I have mds and mdworker tacking up several CPUs on restart for an extended period of time. I've never been able to get any clarification on what these 2 processes do, but they keep my from doing anything useful for a good long period of time. Looking at the process listing, they appear to be in the MetaDataService suite of OSX apps, and that's about all I've been able to determine looking at man pages and several searches of apple sites.
Issue 7: Only on the G4 Mac, periodically I'll get the gray overlay of "You must restart your computer now." The thing is, things still appear to work somewhat, and what I've been able to see is that one of the CPUs appears to be offline in the activity monitor, which I always have up. I'm able to quit cleanly, AFAIK, out of most of the things I have running, but can't issue a normal shutdown, always requires hard reset (power button for 8 seconds or whatever the timeframe). spindump appears to be the culprit, or instigator. The CPU going offline is troubling. Not sure if I have a CPU going bad or a software problem with an app. The logs are riddled with all kinds of errors, but nothing indicative of what the problem is in fact.
This probably won't all post, and I don't expect everyone to take a stab at any and all of the issues. Just a less than gruntled user, and long time supporter, less than impressed lately. The features are big sellers and instigated a lot of the upgrade. For instance, I love spaces, some of the new themes in iDVD, and a lot of other things. I could do without the instability.

Oh, well that was a whole other kettle of fish:
Oh the G4 I attempted to install iLife '08 before Lepoard was available. About the only thing that installed cleanly was iPhoto. I ended up reinstalling everything back to iLife '06, and then upgrading back to the current stable version of the iLife '06 version. I didn't attempt a reinstall until after I upgraded to Leopard.
When I did reinstall, I made a iLife '06 folder, copied all iLife apps into it, and upgraded. Seemed to work, except for the part where iMovie gets left behind and iDVD is only mostly functional.
When I installed on the other 2 machines, it was after installing Leopard and all upgrades. On those 2 machines, I didn't bother with the copy, I just moved everything to the iLife '06 folder I created, and did a fresh install.
I didn't have to do anything with the iPhoto Libraries, that I can recall.
I always do an upgrade, never an archive and install. I've never had a problem with this back to 10.1 or 10.2.

10.5.8 Server / severe Spotlight issues

Hello everybody,
i am currently experiencing quite some problems with Spotlight on 10.5.8 Server:
- Spotlight is running
- the Network Shares are all Spotlight enabled
- sudo mdutil -s -a shows all Network Shares as indexed
- When running a search directly on the server, everything seems to be ok. When running a search on a client (CMD+F) and searching inside a folder on a network share, search results are shown, but when trying to open them, i get an errormessage stating that the alias can´t be opened as the original file can´t be found. When conducting the same search on the server, everything seems to be fine
What i´ve tried until now:
- restarting spotlight server
- reindexing all network shares
- reindexing the client machines
- checked permissions
Nothing seems to help. Is there any possibility to reset the whole spotlight search system?
Thanks a lot for your help
Tobias

I was wondering if you found a solution for the search issue? We're having the same issues as well.
Thanks!

MBP Santa Rosa Airport Issues w/ Leopard

Hi everyone,
I've noticed a few "quirks" since upgrading to Leopard. Whenever my Macbook Pro (Santa Rosa, 2.4 GHz, 17", 4GB RAM) is searching for a wireless network to join, the system becomes completely unresponsive. The mouse pointer stutters and jumps around the screen and it's impossible to precisely control its movement. When I can finally manage to click on the Airport icon in the menu bar and select the appropriate network to join, the problems stop as soon as a connection to a wireless network is established. It only happens when the system is searching for a Network. I should mention that it does this when I am at work (where I connect via 802.1x and TTLS) and at home (where I connect via an Airport Express Router).
Also, my computer no longer automatically connects to my work network (it does at home, though) after a restart or waking from sleep). I have my MBP set to prompt me for a password when it wakes from sleep, but it's near next to impossible to enter in the password because the system hangs so badly as it tries to establish a network connection. Of course, it doesn't connect unless I manage to click the Airport icon and specify the network I wish to join. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
All of this is a little frustrating since the latest updates to Airport in Tiger fixed all of the connection issues I had had previously with my MBP. When I first bought the machine I had many issues with network connections (as did many thousands of others who bought this model). I was wondering if other MBP Santa Rosa owners have observed similar behavior since upgrading to Leopard, and if so, does anyone have any suggestions as to how to fix this issue?
I should also mention that my Mac Mini C2D 1.83GHz (latest model) has no such issues so I think this is something that is still linked to this particular model of MBP.
Many thanks!

I am moving this over here, from the boot camp section. Hopefully this is more the location that this needs to be in. Well, my problem is not as extreme as some, but still an annoyance. I installed Leopard the first day, and immediately had HUGE airport issues. The computer would lose my hub. I run an Airport Extreme with an Express as a WDS. The computer would see the express, but lose the extreme completely. So no internet. If I messed with it long enough, I could get the computer to recognize the extreme, but as soon as the computer went to sleep, it would lose it again. I installed the keychain update, and the situation didn't get much better. Most of the time I get the "You are not connected to the Internet" error in Safari, and when I run network diagnostics the computer "finds" the internet again, and I get a "Network configuration change detected" message and all my lights go green.
After I installed the Keychain update, I repaired disk permissions. Any ideas?

Spotlight issue in leopard

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