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Evinyatar · Oct 20, 2003, 12:16 PM

This is what I just sent to Apple feedback:
At home I have a PowerMac G4 400MHz with plenty of storage (180GB). So I often use that machine as a fileserver. The problems arise when I arrive at school, open up the PowerBook, try to save a Word document and the whole system just hangs with the spinning rainbow cursor because I forgot to unmount the network drives and the computer keeps looking for them. It usually takes about 5 minutes (or what seems an eternity when it's an SMB share) for it to realize that "no, those drives aren't coming back any time soon so lets forget about them", but all that time I'm sitting there looking stupid and receiving sarcastic comments about the value of this 2700 euro machine. It makes MacOS X look stupid. There should be at least a window popping up after say 10 seconds that tells the user that it is in fact looking for a network device and possibly presenting the option to abort the operation early.

Is this at all better in Panther?

ajbaker · Oct 20, 2003, 01:03 PM

Same problem. Any network that has disappeared seems to cause OS X (and all open applications) to sprial out of control for a few minutes. I remember seeing a hint on macosxhints that would allow you to shorten the timeout period (or something similar). I'm of the belief however such an advanced OS on a portable machine (and therefore constantly changing network settings) should just deal with it.

Some concillation is gained from knowing Windows hangs on the save/open dialog when showing My Computer if network conditions have changed - but only for around 20 secs.

A

Oneota · Oct 20, 2003, 01:05 PM

It's much better in Panther - it brings up a dialog saying that it's trying to reconnect, with a nice little "Disconnect" button which instantly terminates the search.

Much, much better.

Mithras · Oct 20, 2003, 01:05 PM

Panther resolves this issue.

EDIT - gah, beaten to it!

Scarpa · Oct 20, 2003, 01:08 PM

Originally posted by Oneota:
It's much better in Panther - it brings up a dialog saying that it's trying to reconnect, with a nice little "Disconnect" button which instantly terminates the search.

Really!?!?! I'm buying it!! This is the single most aggravating thing about Mac OSX to me.

riverfreak · Oct 20, 2003, 03:50 PM

Originally posted by Scarpa:
Really!?!?! I'm buying it!! This is the single most aggravating thing about Mac OSX to me.

Wow! That is great news if this is fixed in panther. I had gotten into the habit of ejected mounted drives before taking my PB with me. I can't tell you how many times I had to open it back up to make sure I had ejected the drives just to avoid that lag period.

C.J. Moof · Oct 20, 2003, 04:01 PM

Man, I'm glad to hear that. I've had my blood pressure raised dozens of times for forgetting to unmount local servers before taking my powerbook home. Truly sucks hard to have your "portable supercomputer" rendered useless b/c it's trying to find something that isn't there.

Now.... if you have a file on a CD open, and try to eject the CD, does Panther still say "I can't do that because it's in use", or have we come back to OS9's usefulness by saying "I can't do that because File X is in use by Program Y, close the file and try again"?

mbperk · Oct 20, 2003, 10:09 PM

Oh! Thank goodness. Glad to know I share the agony with others.

It happens to me at least 4 times a week. I always forget to eject my Win SMB server before putting my PB to sleep when I leave work. When I get home it locks up the finder every time.

Evinyatar · Nov 3, 2003, 04:39 PM

Installed Panther and it doesn't seem to be resolved totally yet. I had been browsing my shares through the Network thing in the Finder and mounted a few others. When I unplugged the PowerBook the dialog popped up and I could cancel it, but many applications would still hang.
I started looking around and apparently the Network browsing in the Finder mounts the ones you browse through as well, somewhere in /private/var/tmp/..... One of those mounts had gotten stuck, and cd'ing to its mount point resulted in the shell freezing. I hope this was just a one-time-only glitch, but annoying nonetheless. Even upon plugging the PowerBook back in those applications would not come back to life. I had to reboot.

K++ · Nov 3, 2003, 07:38 PM

Originally posted by Evinyatar:
Installed Panther and it doesn't seem to be resolved totally yet. I had been browsing my shares through the Network thing in the Finder and mounted a few others. When I unplugged the PowerBook the dialog popped up and I could cancel it, but many applications would still hang.
I started looking around and apparently the Network browsing in the Finder mounts the ones you browse through as well, somewhere in /private/var/tmp/..... One of those mounts had gotten stuck, and cd'ing to its mount point resulted in the shell freezing. I hope this was just a one-time-only glitch, but annoying nonetheless. Even upon plugging the PowerBook back in those applications would not come back to life. I had to reboot.

That's your fault for going to /private. Mac OS X provides you a convenient link to a working mount throught the /Volumes directory. If it didn't work or has become disconnected its no longer there even though the /Volumes mount is a soft link to a /private/var/automount path.