Missives from the 6th Floor

I had planned to work from home today, and saw that dream vanishing - my install DVD, and the Firewire drive with my pre-upgrade backup was across the water in the office.

I booted into single user mode, got the system "up" (i.e. ran /etc/rc) and tried to figure out how to launch the WindowServer. Finally discovered that if you just "open" an application that depends on it, all the core services start.

Discovered that as root, applications didn't crash immediately.

That was encouraging.

So I called a friend who's far more of an OS X nut than I am, and she had some useful suggestions. Create a new user account, copy all my old stuff into it, and then remove my old account.

The new account didn't have the "everything crashes" problem either - but I didn't love the idea of having to re-create all my settings, so I looked at the preference files that had been created for the new user and figured it was likely that one of those files, in my "real" account, was corrupt and causing the problem.

Initially I tried removing loginwindow.plist - figuring it was one of the items starting on login causing trouble. No dice.

Ooh, ooh, I know - it might be APE or ShapeShifter (even though I hadn't applied a new guiKit since none of them are 10.4 aware yet). Disabled both - still no dice.

So I backed up ~/Library/Preferences and rsync'd the virgin preference files into my real account.

Logout, login as "me" and viola - nothing's crashing.

But my dock was all screwed up (well, reset to default at least) and none of my startup items had started up. So, I grabbed the dock preferences from my backup and logged in again.

Still no crashing.

At that point I declared victory and reset, by hand, the few other prefs I'd lost.

But I started thinking about the troubleshooting process required to simply login to the machine - booting into single user mode (knowing that OS X, as a unix variant, would have a single-user mode), figuring out how to launch the GUI as root, etc. etc.

How the devil would an archetypical Mac user respond to this situation?

I guess they'd have called a friend, or called Apple, or maybe they'd just wipe the machine and re-install.

There's an old saying - "build a system an idiot can use, and only idiots will use it." I think that's not quite right - perhaps it should be "build a system an idiot can use, and you'd better well make sure it doesn't break - 'cause you've ensured your users aren't going to be able to fix it."

Oh, and the VPN software that started this whole thing? It seems that it dies after the first successful connection is lost. I've figured out how to restart it, and no reboot is required. :)