Skip to main content

AFP Problems with Mac OS X Tiger Update 10.4.11

I recently installed a Synology DS209 NAS in a customer’s site and was very happy with its level of performance and ease of setup.  Using SMB/CIFS I was getting about 40MB/s copying a file from it to my MacBook running Windows 7 under Boot Camp.  That is seriously fast!  My D-Link DNS-323 manages about 12MB/s and a 512GB Apple Time Capsule I’m currently playing with struggles along at about 7MB/s.

Things were a bit slower over AFP which seems to be fairly much to be expected.  One Mac running Leopard was fine, another running Tiger 10.4.5 was also fine.  However, one of the customer’s machines was giving awful trouble.  This old iMac G5 had been updated some time back with 10.4.11.  The shared folders would mount but you could barely use the share for a second before it ground to a halt and the Finder became unresponsive and had to be Relaunched.

I tried everything I could think of… updating firmware on the NAS, changing the network switch, playing with TCP/IP and AppleTalk settings, doing an Archive and Install on the iMac and installing all the updates.  All to no avail.  The other Mac in the company running Tiger was fine, why not this one?  Eventually, after a day of fruitless work it struck me: the Mac that was working fine was on 10.4.5, the troublesome iMac was on 10.4.11.  I did an Archive and Install on the iMac but didn’t install the Mac OS updates… all was fine!  I had to put on 10.4.8 for Illustrator CS3 to work properly but this update didn’t cause any problems.  Whew!

So, in conclusion, I can say that if you have an old iMac G5 running Tiger and you want to have functional AFP performance DO NOT INSTALL 10.4.11.  It will break AFP.  Perhaps it was an update between 10.4.8 and 10.4.11, who knows?  However, when you re-install Apple Update will prompt you to update to 10.4.11.  Don’t do it!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evolution MK-249C MIDI Keyboard Mac OS X Problem

Mac OS X generally seems capable of dealing with just about anything you can throw at it. However upon connecting my trusty Evolution MK-249C MIDI keyboard up to my 2nd generation MacBook it steadfastly refused to play ball. This keyboard has always been instantly recognised by Windows XP and so it was surprising to encounter this. The M-Audio website (M-Audio took over Evolution it appears) offered no real assistance. There was no driver available for Mac OS X 10.4.9 as the keyboard is supposed to be "Class Compliant" which apparently means it doesn't need one... strange. Eventually after consulting some forums I found the fix. The problem seems to be related to Mac OS on the Intel MacBooks. There is a patch on the M-Audio site but only for MacOS 10.1.5. This must be downloaded and installed. Here is the link: http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=support.drivers&f=596 Upon restarting the OS the keyboard was recognised by Mac OS and GarageBand had no trouble tal...
11 comments
Read more

Copying NTFS Permissions with RichCopy

 Microsoft's RichCopy is a fantastic tool for copying/moving files.  It's multithreaded so moves things along quicker and has a nice log so you can see what's working and what's going wrong. It's kind of like a GUI on top of RoboCopy and you can get it here... However, I always forget that it doesn't copy file/folder NTFS permissions by default.  This is what you need to do if you want permissions to copy across to the destination: - Click the "View" menu and then click on "Advanced". - Then click the "Option" button on the right below the "Source" and "Destination" buttons. - Click on "File attributes, Error Handling" - Tick the relevant boxes under the "Security information" section. Hope this helps.
Post a Comment
Read more

XP Startup Issues - The Recovery Console

The Windows Recovery Console is a fantastically useful tool if you find yourself with a PC that will not boot Windows. There are many useful Windows startup tools such as Last Known Good Configuration and the many different flavours of Safe Mode but all of these rely on a bootable Windows system. System Restore is completely useless in this scenario since it relies on one being in Windows to use it. The kinds of things that could couse an unbootable Windows system could be: Corrupted boot files - e.g. NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM Corrputed Windows system files - NTOSKRNL.EXE, HAL.DLL The Recovery Console allows you to boot into an environment "underneath" that of your Windows installation (by using the Windows CD or by choosing it at boot time if you pre-installed it) and so you can perform major low level repairs to your Windows installation. Follow the link below to find out how to use the Recovery Console: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058/
3 comments
Read more