[ThisGuy]

we are in a networked enviornment that serves about 500-600 macs. about 25% of them are running 10.2.x and quite often we run into the problem of some of them hanging on "waiting for application services" during startup. have any of you had this happen and found a solution? the only thing that has solved this problem is reimaging them. i have found very little usefull help on apple's discussions and there is no mention of it here when i did a search.

[gorickey]

I've seen this myself; however, it'll hang there for a good minute or two and then pick up and everything is fine again...never had to re-image due to it though...

[ThisGuy]

Originally posted by gorickey:
I've seen this myself; however, it'll hang there for a good minute or two and then pick up and everything is fine again...never had to re-image due to it though...

we have let them hang over night and have had no progress. booting in verbose mode doesn't tell me much either because it just keeps writing "waiting fo application services" over and over again.

[gorickey]

Originally posted by ThisGuy:
we have let them hang over night and have had no progress. booting in verbose mode doesn't tell me much either because it just keeps writing "waiting fo application services" over and over again.

Well, chances are the following file gets corrupted somehow:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/
Frameworks/ATS.framework/Versions/A/Support/ATSServer

Try replacing that on a "broken" one and see if that fixes the issue? Faster then re-imaging I suppose.

[ThisGuy]

Originally posted by gorickey:
Well, chances are the following file gets corrupted somehow:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/
Frameworks/ATS.framework/Versions/A/Support/ATSServer

Try replacing that on a "broken" one and see if that fixes the issue? Faster then re-imaging I suppose.

could i just rename it temporarily or do i have to replace it for the system to boot properly?

[Geobunny]

Do you by any chance use NIS in your office? If so, that's almost certainly what's causing the problem. I've seen it myself a number of times when NIS is enabled, startup hangs at Application Services.

To check if that is what's causing the hold-up, reboot in single user mode (hold command-S when you hear the startup bong until you get to a black screen with white writing on it)

You may as well run file system consistency check while you're here, so type the following:

Code:
    /sbin/fsck -y

Repeat that until it stops finding errors on your drive. When that's done, mount the drive as writable so you can make changes:

Code:
    /sbin/mount -uw /

Then look at the hostconfig file to see if NIS has been enabled:

Code:
    pico -w /etc/hostconfig

Hit control-V on your keyboard to scroll down each page until you see NISDOMAIN Make sure it says NISDOMAIN=-NO-

It must be all capitals, no spaces and there must be a hyphen on either side of NO.

Code:
Now hit control-X to exit
Y for Yes to save changes
RETURN key to save as the file name it suggests.

shutdown -r now  to restart

[Anand]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
Do you by any chance use NIS in your office? If so, that's almost certainly what's causing the problem. I've seen it myself a number of times when NIS is enabled, startup hangs at Application Services.

To check if that is what's causing the hold-up, reboot in single user mode (hold command-S when you hear the startup bong until you get to a black screen with white writing on it)

You may as well run file system consistency check while you're here, so type the following:

Code:
    /sbin/fsck -y

Repeat that until it stops finding errors on your drive. When that's done, mount the drive as writable so you can make changes:

Code:
    /sbin/mount -uw /

Then look at the hostconfig file to see if NIS has been enabled:

Code:
    pico -w /etc/hostconfig

Hit control-V on your keyboard to scroll down each page until you see NISDOMAIN Make sure it says NISDOMAIN=-NO-

It must be all capitals, no spaces and there must be a hyphen on either side of NO.

Code:
Now hit control-X to exit
Y for Yes to save changes
RETURN key to save as the file name it suggests.

shutdown -r now  to restart

Geobunny, thanks for the help. I was having the same problems and your idea fixed it! Also, thanks for the fantastic walk through.It is great to have people like you on these boards!

[ThisGuy]

i must also say thank you. i screwed one of them up by booting it in target mode and deleting the entire /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb directory. that fixed it, but i had to create a new admin user and my boss told me to stop wasting time with it and just reimage it. thank you again for the fix!

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by ThisGuy:
i must also say thank you. i screwed one of them up by booting it in target mode and deleting the entire /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb directory. that fixed it, but i had to create a new admin user and my boss told me to stop wasting time with it and just reimage it. thank you again for the fix!

Oh dear, I wish you'd asked. That's solvable too...provided you've left the computer running at 3:15am at some point (crucially before the problem appeared and not since). If it happens again, follow these instructions:

Boot in single user as I described above and do the fsck thing and mount thing again. Then move your corrupted NetInfo database (obviously you can ignore this step if you've already deleted it accidently!!). Then restart.

Code:
mv /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb /var/db/netinfo/local.nidbBAD

shutdown -r now

When the computer's rebooted, you'll be at the login screen, but you won't be able to log in as the only user is root which by default has no password! What it has done though is create a brand new NetInfo database. I think you can probably do that without having restarted by using the nicl command, but I'm not about to test my theory!

Reboot into single user again, and set a password for root:

Code:
niutil -createprop / /users/root passwd "" creates a blank password, not really recommended!"
passwd root optionally change the root password to something you'll remember

Reboot as above to get you back to the login screen. Log in by typing ">console" into the username field. The greater than symbol is required, no spaces, no quotation marks. No password either.

You'll now be back to the console (white text on black). Login as root, with either no password or the one you chose above.

Restore the backup that gets made at 3:15 every morning:

Code:
niload -r / -t localhost/local < /var/backups/local.nidump

It's very important that you use the less than symbol above, otherwise you'll overwrite your working backup copy with the empty NetInfo database! Restart one more time, using the command above and you should be good to go with your old users and passwords etc.

Failing that, move or delete your NetInfo database as per the top of this message, then tell OS X to run the whole setup assistant again:

Code:
cd /var/db
rm .AppleSetupDone you need the dot at the start of the filename

[Edit: Damn, I wish I'd searched before posting all that! http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107210
I stand by my instructions though! ]

[Big Mac]

Quite impressive, Geobunny. How can others learn some of those terminal commands?

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
Quite impressive, Geobunny. How can others learn some of those terminal commands?

By reading the manual pages. In the terminal, type man command_name, for example "man shutdown". Use space bar to advance a page, arrow keys move around one line at a time.

Just have a look at the command line apps that come with OS X and run man on any of the ones you don't recognise. They probably won't all have a man page, but the important/useful ones do. The CLI apps can be found by doing:

Code:
ls /usr/local/bin
ls /usr/bin (majority of commands live here)
ls /bin Common commands and shells (what you're typing in) live here
ls /usr/local/sbin You can put your own in here, the directory probably does not exist unless you've added your own programs in there though
ls /usr/sbin
ls /sbin

[JLL]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
Then look at the hostconfig file to see if NIS has been enabled:

Code:
    pico -w /etc/hostconfig

Hit control-V on your keyboard to scroll down each page until you see NISDOMAIN Make sure it says NISDOMAIN=-NO-

It must be all capitals, no spaces and there must be a hyphen on either side of NO.

Code:
Now hit control-X to exit
Y for Yes to save changes
RETURN key to save as the file name it suggests.

shutdown -r now  to restart

Or use Directory Access

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by JLL:
Or use Directory Access

A little more difficult when you can't actually get to the OS X desktop and the only graphics you see are either a plain blue screen or the last part of the startup sequence (as is the case here).

Directory access doesn't always solve the problems anyway. In fact, it can cause more problems than it solves; in the NIS setup screen, if you hit the return key it will put in a carriage return in the field instead of selecting "ok" for the sheet. When that happens, the computer hangs at startup, trying to access a NIS server whose domain name is a single carriage return! Directory Access doesn't tell you that, not very helpful of it!

[JLL]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
A little more difficult when you can't actually get to the OS X desktop and the only graphics you see are either a plain blue screen or the last part of the startup sequence (as is the case here).

D'oh!

[ThisGuy]

i have now run into a machine that this will not fix.

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by ThisGuy:
i have now run into a machine that this will not fix.

Well? Are you going to tell us?!

[ThisGuy]

it is happening again and the fix that geobunny posted is not working. it has happened on 2 different machines and i had to reinstall X.2 to fix the problem. NISDOMAIN was already set to NO when i logged in and ran the commands you told us to run. i tried turning it to YES, saving, rebooting and it hung before application services. i logged in again and changed it back to NO and it hung again at application services. this drives me nuts that i have to reinstall to fix this issue.

[ThisGuy]

bumpity bump bump bump

[alari]

I have the same problem on a Biege G3 with Jaguar,
did anybody find a solution ?
I'm not using NIS, i have a simple home network served by OpenBSD.
It didn't make any difference, if i installed with the lan cable unplugged.