[osxrules]

Ok so I wanted to try and optimize my internet seeing as I have 1MB broadband. So I used cocktail to set some network settings differently - TCP window sizes and turned off delayed acks.

Now, when I go into network preferences, it says that I haven't set up acess to the internet, which is clearly rubbish because I have and I'm connected. So, I checked the console and it says that it can't open the system configuration database.

Where is the system configuration database?

The annoying thing is, when I set the prefences up again, whenever I quit and restart system prefs, it does the same thing.

The only thing I can see that cocktail has done is to call /usr/sbin/sysctl.

[osxrules]

Problem solved. Turns out that one of the programs I ran must have performed a permissions repair wrongly. All the folders in /Library appeared to have the right permissions (owner system - rw, group me - rw, others - r) but I couldn't access the folder contents. I just made myself owner and it worked. I then tried setting it back to system as owner and it still worked. Tiger permissions are a bit quirky in my opinion.

When I change permissions in the finder, as soon as I close the get info windowand reopen, it has reverted back. It's only if I restart the Finder do the changes seem to hold.

The specific folder that needed accessing was in /Library/SystemConfiguration.

[osxrules]

Sorry for the triple post but that wasn't the end of my problems and I think this is important. After finding out that some permissions were at fault in the Library folder, I went ahead and repaired them. I then discovered programs weren't launching right as there was a 3 second delay and a spinning beachball. Same thing happened when switching apps.

I restarted a couple of times to see if it would free something up but no. The last thing I could think to do was to delete all my caches (including system caches). To do this I used SYSTEM OPTIMIZER X and after rebooting, everything seemed fine.

However, I launched my system prefs again as a test to see if the delay was still there and I found that although the delay was fixed, my network preferences had messed up again. Sure enough my /Library/preferences folder was displaying wrongly. I quickly went to my disk utility to repair permissions again and found that not only was /Library/prefs being set wrong but also /Library/caches and /Library/Application Support.

The caches folder makes sense because with faulty permissions, none of my apps could write to it. But I'd been using apps for a while without being able to write to it so perhaps the cache files had gotten out of date. Then when I fixed permissions, the cache files were bad and so slowing down the system.

Ultimately, I reckon the whole problem was caused by System Optimizer X, which seems to be doing something odd with some important Library folders. I'll contact the developer but in the mean time, perhaps avoid it on Tiger for the moment.