I’m more than a little behind, and I know it. In my defense, it’s been a crazy week for me. I’ll not go into the personal stuff – that doesn’t belong here, at least not now. The computer stuff is more than enough.

When applications start crashing on you, with an EXEC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS) `` I’m more than a little behind, and I know it. In my defense, it’s been a crazy week for me. I’ll not go into the personal stuff – that doesn’t belong here, at least not now. The computer stuff is more than enough.

When applications start crashing on you, with an EXEC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS) `/var/log/system.log` while you get ready for work. When you come back, it’s locked solid. Can’t get to the terminal window to see what’s happened. Damnit. It’s time to do those memory tests, right?

Wrong. Well, it’s probably not a bad idea, but it wasn’t the problem that I’ve been having since last Saturday. My boot drive was slowly failing – not in a way that SMART could detect, not in a way that showed up in logs. Just in that silent killer way. So, I started pulling DIMMs, thinking that was my issue. In the middle of the swaps, the computer failed to boot. Grey screen. No Apple logo. Nothing. Boot from Snow Leopard DVD. Fails. Boot from Leopard DVD – well, it works, but the installer crashes as soon as the GUI loads. Damnit damnit damnit.

I finally got the system to boot from the original install DVD’s that came with it – 10.4.7, I think, and realized that one of the internal hard drives was toast. And that I couldn’t boot off my burned Mac OS X DVDs, as my DVD drives are showing their age and aren’t reading burned dual-layer disks properly. Hunting around, I finally find a 10.5 DVD that came from Apple – not on DVD+R/DL media. Boots up just fine, and I load an old hard drive into the system to restore my Time Machine backups to.

And it works, but kernel panics as soon as I try to boot from the restored disk. Booting back into the installer, I realize this is a disk from my PowerMac G5, and the partition table is the old, wrong kind. Reformat as GUID, re-run the restore. Reboot. Kernel panic. Boot in verbose mode off the new disk, and see an error about being unable to exec /sbin/launchd. Not an insignificant process. (Think init or upstart on a RHEL box). Do some digging, realize that you can’t use a 10.5 DVD to restore a 10.6 TimeMachine backup, as the HFS+ mechanics have changed, and you’ll get a lot of errors like this. And realize you can’t find your original Snow Leopard DVD. Just the burned copy that your old SuperDrives refuse to read.

So, another day passes, you borrow an install disk from a friend’s Mac mini, and boy, howdy… you’re back in business. Restore works, everything comes up just as you’d left it the night that it crashed the first time.

Of course, you’ve got nothing done at home in your free time. The pictures to sort, process and edit are languishing, and your blog is sadly neglected. The good news is I was able to develop some code on the side here and there, working towards a distributable, database-backed iptables manipulator, which will see the light of day sooner rather than later, thanks to this delay. So, I’m going to post this now, not even spell checking it, so I can get back to the real meat these days, and hopefully finish up the iptables posts before my 2 year old is accepted to college.