Betalogue

Since my network problems are continuing, I am taking the non-nonsense approach. My plan is the following:

1. I have reverted back to Mac OS X 10.4.3. I did an “Archive and Install” installation of Mac OS X 10.4.2 from the DVD that came with my G5 Quad, with the option to preserve my user and network settings, and then applied the Mac OS X 10.4.3 Combo updater to it.
2. If my suspicions are correct, this will eliminate the problem altogether, which I think was introduced by either Mac OS X 10.4.4 or Mac OS X 10.4.5. I will wait for one week to make sure that the problem doesn’t occur again.
3. Then I will apply the Mac OS X 10.4.4 Combo updater, and wait another week to see if the problem occurs with that version.
4. If not, I will then apply the Mac OS X 10.4.5 Combo updater, and then I am pretty sure the problem will reappear.

During that time, I will not install any other software updates, except for stand-alone things that cannot have any impact on Mac OS X’s networking architecture. Fortunately, as far as I am aware, there is nothing in my daily workflow that requires either 10.4.4 or 10.4.5. I can live with an older version of the system for a few weeks without any problems.

Once I’ve been through this process, I will send a detailed bug report outlining the steps I took. These steps won’t help identify which part of OS X is causing the problem, but they will provide clear evidence that the problem is caused by either the 10.4.4 or the 10.4.5 updater. It will then be Apple’s job to take this seriously and try to determine what it is that they introducedin one of these two updaters that is causing the problem.

That’s probably going to be the hardest part. As far as I can tell, there are a number of reports of various network-related problems (I have seen things on MacInTouch that seem to mirror what I am experiencing, and I have a colleague locally who is experiencing similar problems as well), but it’s obviously not a bug that is affecting millions of people. Otherwise, Apple would already know about it and have a fix for it. So it’s going to be a challenge to get Apple’s attention and to get them to focus on this particular problem and fix it.

I don’t know if I can achieve this all by myself, but I will try…

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 10:45 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.