Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update

kenthorvath was one of many readers to note that "Apple has quietly released an update for OS X Tiger. New features include a widget manager for dashboard and some 200 bug fixes and enhancements."

no zlib patch

[inio]

Incase anyone's wondering, this update doesn't seem to include a patch to zlib to fix the buffer overflow in it.

Server Update Notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Enhancements

The following items are some of the enhancements and improvements in Mac OS X Server 10.4.2 Update:

Mail Services

Upgrades SpamAssassin and ClamAV to include additional support for TNEF (winmail.dat) files and new detection mechanisms for JPEG-based exploits.
servermgrd

Addresses an issue in which Product License Keys may be reported as invalid due to case sensitivity.
Workgroup Manager

Addresses issues with the creation of custom home directories specified within a subdirectory of a sharepoint.
Addresses compatibility issues for administration of a 10.3.9 server from a 10.4 system with 10.4 admin tools.
Xgrid Admin

Addresses an issue which prevented the Xgrid Admin application from securely connecting to controllers that required Kerberos authentication.
Addresses an issue which may have prevented controllers from sending files to agents.
Improvements made for batch jobs sent through the command line.
Open Directory

Addresses an issue that prevents systems from connecting to Windows 2003 Active Directory deployments.
Addresses an issue in which systems stop authenticating through Active Directory.
Addresses an issue in which Active Directory users who are set as computer administrators may not get admin access to a computer.
Addresses an issue that prevents Mobile Accounts from authenticating with Active Directory.
Addresses an issue where the DirectoryService process may stop after waking from sleep.
Addresses an issue in which newly-created accounts may not be able to authenticate or appear in user lists.
Addresses an issue where Password Server may stop working, causing authentications to fail when replicated Password Servers are used.
Addresses an issue where kerberos authentications may fail after importing a large number of users (60,000 or more).
Apple File Services

Addresses an issue where Apple File Services may pause indefinitely after experiencing heavy loads.
Addresses an issue which prevented Apple File Services from setting inherited permissions in nested folders within shared volumes.
Addresses an issue where multiple automounts from a single client would incorrectly count against 10-client Server licenses.
Disk Imaging

Addresses an issue which may have caused failure reports when used with large volumes.
Managed Users

Addresses an issue which prevented some Login Window management options from being honored.
NFS

Addresses issues which may have caused the mountd process to crash when NFS is used to host HFS volumes.
SMB

Improves handling of workgroup and file names when connecting and copying to shared SMB volumes.
Addresses issues causing -36 connection failures when connecting to SMB shared volumes with an old keychain password.
Addresses an issue that may cause kernel panics on multiple Xsan systems when unmounting Xsan volumes.

Re:Just got it

[Matrix9180]

did you REPORT IT [apple.com]? if you do report it, something more than "that iPhoto bug" would be helpful too.

need to fix spolight too

[goombah99]

While I love being able to text search in content, spotlight is so horribly beta I'm almost at the point of disabling it. The thing keeping me from that is that I'd lose my mail search.

The problems with spolight are well known now but I'll recite them:

1) doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every document witha Q in it. You cant stop it. No hacker has yet reporeted finding where they store the default time delay so you can adjust it.

2) When you sort by date you can only sort by last access date not creation date. Worse yet, if you click on one of the items on the spotlight list (to get info on it) spotlight "touches" the document and poof it has todays date as its last viewed date. So that's totally useless and even dangerous if you are relying on it to figure out the most recent version of something you were using.

3) in the same vein, over time spotlight seems to touch all the resource or meta data forks creation dates. Or maybe not, I'm not sure. but the net effect is if you try to rsync it to another drive on a unix computer (using apple_double ) to preseve the meta data it ends up detecting that EVERY file has changed and recopies it, totally defeating the point of rsync.

4) you are supposed to be able to disable it from indexing a disk by using the "mdutil -i off "command. This only works some of the time. For example I had a two partition disk and while spotlight indexing is turned off on both, it still indexes one of them but not the other. (yes I deleted the old index). If you declare something Private it does not actually delete the index but simply does not report results for that folder. This is useless for stopping indexing on removable disks.

5) if you plug in a USB thumb driver it may decide to index it even if your just copying files off of it.

6) it's buggy. Often in Mail it fails to find content you know is present. Dont know if thats Mail, Spotlight or the API thats gummed.

7) It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4 imac. Oddly it seems somewhat closer to reasonable on a G5

8) there's no simple way to have it default to find by name. in the finder to find by name you have to do the following steps. press command-F, pull down the find-by-kind and change it to find by name, then enter the name in the test field. Dont type slowly or it finds everthing with the first letter you type while you wait for five minutes. You can try to change the default from find-by-kind to find-by-name but most (but not all!) users find this change is not sticky and it reverts to find_by-kind. (and who would want find-by-kind to be the default!)

9) find by name is insanley slow compared to say "locate" in unix. it's not a lot faster than "find" in unix. Apparently they must not have indexed their DB on the name. what were they thinking?

Re:need to fix spolight too

[jeffehobbs]

Amen to this:

doesn't let you finish typing before it searches.

That is annoying. And let me also add that, conversely, Dashboard would be far more efficient and useful if it updated itself before I press the damn Dashboard hotkey. As it is, the way Dashboard works now:

1) Hit the Dashboard hotkey.
2) Wait for all the various pieces of info to come in via the network. Keep waiting. Isn't this convenient?
3) See the info you want(ed), in roughly the same time it would have taken you to open up Safari and click a bookmark.

But the way Dashboard should work, in my opinion:

1) Dashboard gets that info for you in the background. (Dashboard occasionally updates that info, too).
2) Hitting the Dashboard hotkey shows the info you want, so you can read it in a split-second, and get on with your life.

~jeff

Re:According to new benchmarks

[elbobo]

I cringe at saying it, but I *actually am* finding this one snappier. Or to be more precise, I'm finding it less memory hungry.

Widgets seem to be using up considerably less memory and running more smoothly than previously, which in turn frees up more memory for other tasks and has reduced general swapping.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[drdink]

Have you reported these issues to Bugreporter [apple.com]? Even if you think somebody else did, the duplicate count will make it more obvious that people are annoyed by these things.

Re:Tab Key Adopts New Function

[SonicBV]

Check in the Keyboard & Mouse system preference. Often times, I try to make a custom key command in some app, and it's already taken by something in the Full Keyboard Access list.

If that's not it, however, I'm out of ideas. Having never tried that key combination before the update (or at least I don't remember trying it), I dunno if it's new.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[GaryPatterson]

If Dashboard were to do that, you'd see occasional drops in system speed. These would vary from barely noticable to "what happened to my system"

When you activate it, all the processes page into memory (if they're not already there) and run their little JavaScripts. That means that there's a lot of memory/disk swapping going on, plus the network activity inherent in grabbing this sort of data.

If you're doing some intensive processing, that may cause disk thrashing as you're paging Dashboard widgets in while the app you're using gets paged out but then it grabs the CPU for a slice, requiring data to be paged back in, and so on...

I also see a brief wait before I get the data (and I'm on an iBook 1.2GHz and 1500kbps ADSL) but I prefer that to the sort of issues I'd see if I were playing a game. A solution is to activate the Dashboard for an instant, drop back into whatever you were doing, and then come back to it a few moments later. It's usually fine and everything's updated.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[mr100percent]

I believe the Now Playing (Tivo) widget updates in the background depending on how many minutes you set it before you update, or you can have it update only when you call Dashboard.

Yes, that wait for all the other widgets is really annoying. Can't they set it to a high nice and then have them update?

200 bugs fixed?

[rorya]

I think the poster misunderstood. The linked page talks about the supposed 200 new features in 10.4, not bugs fixed in this update.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[asparagus]

Re 3:

This is mainly a problem with the new resource-fork friendly rsync (I assume you're using -E). It can't/doesn't compare the resource forks, and so simply just recopies all files that include them. It's sort of the safer action (makes certain what you're syncing to matches) but, as you've found, gets quite irritating in certain instances (for example, it continually recopies my 2GB VPC image). Here's hoping they fix this in a new version.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[sg3000]

My experience has been different here.

> doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was
> supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard
> the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and
> qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing
> "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every
> document witha Q in it.

My computer is fine here. Right now, I'm trying this out:

1. command+space. Boom! Spotlight opens
2. Press q. Spotlight starts searching.
3. I can easily continue typing 'uicktime' and it works fine. The results pare down to what I'm looking for.

I confirmed that if I type Q (and just wait), I get more than 4,043 results, so I've got plenty of files to look through.

So I don't notice any performance issues with Spotlight here. It works fine for me. Maybe you've got a problem with your disk? Try running Disk First Aid or something like that.

> It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4
> imac.

It works great on my 1.5 GHz 'powerboog' and my wife's 1 GHz PowerBook.

In all, I'd hardly call Spotlight "beta". It has room for improvements, but it works great for me.

Re:Widget "Manager"

[Biotech9]

The widget manager isn't much of a manager. All you can do is uncheck a widget to disable it. This basically just hides it from the widget dock. There is no way to move a widget from ~/Library/Widgets/ to /Library/Widgets/ and you can't delete widgets.

To delete a widget in the widget manager, click the red button to the right of the widget icon.

Yeah! It's complicated I know.

Been around since NeXT

[John Nowak]

This bug has been around since NeXTStep. It is due to issue with lookupd, which has lead many engineers to call it lockupd instead. A real pain in the ass, and one that I have no idea why they refuse to fix.

Broken: Internet Sharing over AirPort

[andy55]

At my home office and I use internet sharing to share my 17" powerbook's ethernet wire connection to a couple PCs in the office via airport/wifi. After installing 10.4.2, it's now broken--my vaio and my dell laptops can no longer connect to my powerbook's airport when encryption is on. Since security is an issue (and I can't have an unsecured network), I'm pretty much hosed (unless I want to go out and buy a wireless router). Sigh.

Andy

WPA-PSK with AES finally supported

[EchoMirage]

Apple finally fixed one of my biggest complaints with this release: as of 10.4.2, OS X now supports AES encryption for WPA-PSK (a component of WPA2), eliminating the barrier to WPA2 adoption for Mac users. Among vendors whose equipment supports WPA-PSK with AES is Linksys, Belkin, Cisco, and doubtless many others.

Three cheers for Apple!

Re:A pretty useless update.

[johnbeat]

>Still not auto-connecting to wireless networks as in 10.3.9

I realize that this is still Apple's fault, but there may be a solution; I had the same problem, until I ran across this:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?13@778.k1IL aLeWY5K.0@.68b170ea/0 [apple.com]

Not sure if that link will continue to work, but the solution was:

"Go to the Library (on the hard drive, not the user), then Preferences and take the SystemConfiguration folder out and place it on the desktop. Then restart and set up your network preferences again."

That solved the problem for me. My computer now once again autoconnects on wakeup from sleep.

Jerry