[philc]

I have been lurking quietly the last few days and have noticed some common problems and some common solutions.

1- Permissions

It seems as though one of the most common solutions put forth is to rebuild all your permissions. I can honestly say I've never had to do this on any of the AIX servers I manage. Is there an inherent flaw somewhere or is this something users are changing incorrectly?

What pro-active methods have you used to actually find root causes rather than resetting everything?

Would it make sense to capture a full file listing with all permissions when the machine is running good? You could then compare this to a new listing when problems come up?


2- Preference Files

What is going on with these it looks as though every application is prone to these problems? I can't believe preferences are going corrupt left right and centre. Is this a draconian troubleshooting practice or is this the permission problem again?

Should I be backing up my preferences once I get my applications working how I like them? I would hate to have to go back and review 100 settings because an application starts crashing and I have to remove the preferences.

I could be missing a big part of the picture don't kill me, educate me

Phil

[Person Man]

Originally posted by philc:
I have been lurking quietly the last few days and have noticed some common problems and some common solutions.

1- Permissions

It seems as though one of the most common solutions put forth is to rebuild all your permissions. I can honestly say I've never had to do this on any of the AIX servers I manage. Is there an inherent flaw somewhere or is this something users are changing incorrectly?

What pro-active methods have you used to actually find root causes rather than resetting everything?

Would it make sense to capture a full file listing with all permissions when the machine is running good? You could then compare this to a new listing when problems come up?

No need to capture a full file listing with all permissions when the machine is running fine, the "repair permissions" function in Disk Uitilities uses the permissions record found in the receipts in the /Library/Receipts folder to repair them.

Permissions corruption doesn't happen all the time but it is still an important part of troubleshooting. The problem is that there is more than one way to install applications, etc. Some apps use Apple's package installer. Some apps use their own installers, etc. Not all of them respect permissions. Some may even inadvertently change permissions and not tell any one. The same as for poorly-written apps. (Or poor conversions). OS X is a much less controlled environment than AIX when it comes to installing and running applications.

[bergy]

Hello ...

Here is an interesting discussion on permission repair ..

Repair Permissions Discussion
http://discussions.info.apple.com/we...0@.68a662b8/23

[Big Mac]

I have never, since 10.0, had a single preferences problem. Problems with preferences were very common in the classic OS, of course. And I have never had a serious permissions issue. I had a rather thorny DNS cache problem but was able to solve that with the dig command (see my thread on this forum for more info). There are a few issues that crop up from time to time on OS X, but in my view there are no "common problems." Remember, people post when they have a problem much more often than when their computers are working optimally. Just my take, FWIW.

[JKT]

Originally posted by philc:
2- Preference Files

What is going on with these it looks as though every application is prone to these problems? I can't believe preferences are going corrupt left right and centre. Is this a draconian troubleshooting practice or is this the permission problem again?

Should I be backing up my preferences once I get my applications working how I like them? I would hate to have to go back and review 100 settings because an application starts crashing and I have to remove the preferences.

I could be missing a big part of the picture don't kill me, educate me

Phil

Removing/deleting prefs files is actually a troubleshooting hang over from the OS 9 and earlier days. These files could get corrupted far more easily in OS7/8/9 owing to the far greater instability of the system itself compared to OS X and it was just a quick and easy check to perform if you started having problems in those systems. More often than not, real preference file issues that do occur in OS X are likely to happen for people like me who regularly beta test software where crashing of the app can cause issues with those files.

You don't have to delete the preferences to check if they are the source of the problem - simply moving the file(s) out of the Preferences folder and re-launching the app will show whether the source of the issue is with your preferences file - if it isn't, you can simply put it back and try something else instead. In essence, it is simply a quick, easy and harmless means of troubleshooting that sometimes pays dividends. FWIW, the preference file itself doesn't have to be corrupted - a bug or bugs in the application code could lead to a combination of preference settings causing issues, which is why this quick check can be useful. If you identify the issue as being due to your preferences file, it is often easier to delete it and start from scratch than to identify the precise combination of settings that caused the problem in the first place.

It pays to regularly backup everything important on your computer. If you value your settings in apps, then backing up the Preferences folder makes perfect sense anyway. They don't occupy any great amount of disk space.

People often say to repair your permissions as, again, it is a simple to do, relatively quick and totally harmless troubleshooting technique that may prove beneficial once in a while. However, it isn't exactly a necessity and is only prudent to do if you are often installing lots of apps via e.g VISE installers (which do seem more prone to altering preferences to the wrong settings in my experience).

[jasong]

Also, some apps are constantly writing to their preferences file. The more often you modify the file, the greater the chance of this happening.

Personally I have rarely done a repair permissions, and I have never found a case where it has actually solved something. I also can't think of a single case of a corrupted pref file in OS X.

-- Jason

[Millennium]

Originally posted by philc:
I have been lurking quietly the last few days and have noticed some common problems and some common solutions.

1- Permissions

It seems as though one of the most common solutions put forth is to rebuild all your permissions. I can honestly say I've never had to do this on any of the AIX servers I manage. Is there an inherent flaw somewhere or is this something users are changing incorrectly?

There's an inherent flaw, but it's not in the system itself. Rather, it's in installers, which (if they're not well-written, and that means most of them) can overwrite prermissions. Apple's own installer is particularly guilty of this, though other installation systems can do it too.

[philc]

Thank you to all of you for your informative responses.

Person Man, it is good to know about the receipts folder.
Bergy thank you for the interesting link.
Big Mac you are very right in that people are not going to be making posts when everything is working properly.

JKT your response was exactly what I was hoping for I'm glad this is a relic of the OS9 days. I look forward to not having any of these problems in OSX.

I have to say so far I am really happy with the Mac community. A posting like the one I made in other communities may have resulted in attacks.