(Apologies in advance to non-Apple users)
Mac folks,
Last week AT&T “upgraded” our Uverse service. All of our Macs running
anything 10.6.8 or older quit working.
Cure was to turn off IPv6: System Preferences -> Network -> Advanced ->
TCP/IP -> iPv6 to “Off” instead of “Automatic”.
Symptoms were *very* widespread, and matched reasonably well to failing
hard drive or failing memory - system freeze, spinning beach-ball forever,
can’t read directory, etc. etc. etc. On the G3, I rebooted in single-user mode
and actually got part way through the output of “ps -aux” in one case before
freezing. However it did respond to Ctl-C and would then do a “ps -a” no
problem, just no “ps -aux”. We were a bit silly, didn’t read our Uverse email,
and didn’t test other systems before hooking more old systems into the network
- which then didn’t work. We were panicing about viruses, pulling hair out,
sacrificing goats ...
Systems affected were :
iMac G3 Mac OS X 10.4.11 - ethernet
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X 10.4.11 - wi-fi
iMac 2011 intel Mac OS X 10.6.8 - wi-fi
Apologies if this is a known bug, but it really puzzled us for a while
because the effects were so systemic; I hope I can prevent anybody else from
getting a nice new (needless) hard drive like the 2011 iMac did…
- Mark
210-522-6025 office
210-379-4635 cell
