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Matts (1087)

Matts
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I work for MessageLabs [messagelabs.com] in Gloucester UK, except I live in Kitchener, ON, Canada. I write spam filters, MTA software, high performance network software, string matching algorithms, and other cool stuff mostly in Perl and C. We're always hiring so feel free to email me (no telecommuters though - I'm the only exception :-).

Journal of Matts (1087)

Wednesday November 30, 2005

03:50 PM

OSX Panther Update Nightmare

[ #27806 ]

I've spent the best part of the whole morning restoring a Mac OS X installation due to the latest OS update destroying some libraries completely and preventing me from being able to get to the login screen. I had to go back and do a system install from my 10.3.0 disk and then run SoftwareUpdate a few times.

So I've lost LOADS of applications that ended up in /usr/bin. A quick diff shows that 190 apps aren't in /usr/bin that were in my previous system, and I fear just copying them over won't be a very good plan.

Not only that, but my printer settings have gone, and these were very carefully customised for photo printing. My monitor calibration settings are also all gone, so I have to do all that again. I'm sure I'll discover other things as time goes on.

Today computers suck.

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backups... (Score:2)

by ask (83)

Not that I'm that good at taking regular backups (knock on wood), but I can highly recommend getting a firewire driveand cloning the system drive occasionally. ... but you knew that already. :-)

- ask

--
-- ask bjoern hansen [askbjoernhansen.com], !try; do();
- Re:backups... (Score:2)
  
  by Matts (1087)
  
  Yeah. I do actually keep a copy of /Users/matt on an external firewire (actually USB2) drive, but didn't have the space to also store the whole drive.
  
  Maybe it's time to upgrade that drive. Two days wasted on this now (mostly because I cocked up when restoring something from /usr/lib and had to start over from scratch again).
  - Re:backups... (Score:1)
    
    by Lecar_red (5694)
    
    I had a similar problem with my Mac except the drive complete croaked. I figured $100 bucks was worth it for a new fireware drive off newegg. Useful apps get installed in other places than just /Users, now I just mirror the whole thing... Good luck on the restore, it sucks to have to do.
Fink (Score:1)

by ChrisDolan (2855)

I recommend using Fink next time around. Then you can do simple things like the following to get started:

fink install mysql
fink install dbd-mysql-pm586
fink install xml-parser-pm586
fink install svn-client-ssl

etc. See fink.sf.net
- Re:Fink (Score:2)
  
  by Matts (1087)
  
  I do use fink. Fink wasn't lost in this debacle - it's still all there and working fine.
use linux! (Score:1)

by jmason (3282)

Get a proper OS! ;) Not, but seriously -- I'm looking forward to eventually running all my machines as Xen instances, so I can roll back when crap like this happens.