MAMA's Techno-Geek Thread

[GadgetGav]

Who's your ISP and what cable modem is it..? They may have updated the modem firmware recently... did you just get told the speed was going up..? When I switched to FIOS, my old Linksys 'b' wireless basestation stopped working because it's firmware was too old. With a Mac it was too much hassle to update it, so I just turned it off and went to the Airport Express. Could be that you have a similar mismatch between modem, router and base station firmwares.

[bethandlouis]

Hello Geeks-just checking in and hoping that airport problems are not catching. I did my good wife thing today and bought my lovely husband a new mac, airport base, and mighty mouse-the mighty mouse is very interesting. I got him the mac mini because I was afraid to move the iMac (I threw that box away years ago). Talk to you later. Jason-hope your airport gets better.

[GadgetGav]

Beth, you found a mighty mouse in stock..?!? Well done..!
Have fun with the new machine

[bethandlouis]

They just got a shipment and snagged it. I am way too used to the one button mouse I keep pulling up menus everywhere but the scroll is very neat. Louis' machines are at the Genius Bar getting memory upgrade and data transfer so I will play with it until his comes home!

[jwardell]

beth-cool. The new iMac G5 is a great machine though, much better than the imac G4. Course we all love the mac mini too.

I ordered a mighty mouse "replacement part" to see what it's like but the ship date keeps getting knocked back. I'm sure it won't replace my 8-button logitech but I can use it on one of the other machines.

Snid one day my cablemodem started going out intermittantly, after it has been working fine for a year with no changes. I called them,they ran their tests blah blah blah, I kept telling them they must have done something to reduce signal strength. They couldn't do anything without sending someone out, and I didn't want to take off work to bother with it. Problem got worse over the next week. Called again, still "nothing wrong here."

I went outside with a flashlight, screwed open the cable box. Found two 5-way splitters in series. (!) pulled each connection one at a time, ran back in to see which room lost signal, till I traced mine with the cablemodem was the last one on the last splitter. So I instead put in a three-way splitter with my cablemodem and the HD cable box on the first split, then connected the other splitters all behind it. Never a problem since. Of course that was always that way, but at least now I am much more immune to their signal strength drops.

[bakerjc]

Don't know if this has been shown here, but for you Mac users, you should take a look at this. If you've not installed it on your machines you should. Nice little utility.

http://applejack.sourceforge.net/

[GBMINI]

Quote: Originally Posted by jwardell

Snid one day my cablemodem started going out intermittantly, after it has been working fine for a year with no changes. I called them,they ran their tests blah blah blah, I kept telling them they must have done something to reduce signal strength. They couldn't do anything without sending someone out, and I didn't want to take off work to bother with it. Problem got worse over the next week. Called again, still "nothing wrong here."

My Adelphia cable used to be crap in the cold winter weather ... apparently the temperature affects the fiber-optic connections (stretching / shrinking the "cable" presumably), so the signal can increase / decrease according to temperature.
Techs eventually came out and boosted the signal, which helped - till warmer weather came. Now the modem was being overloaded! I got a replacement modem and an inline attenuator - now I sometimes need to remove or replace the attenuator in winter/summer, when the cable modem starts playing up.
Isn't technology wonderful

[Actual Size]

Have to do the reverse with my Motorola SB4100 from Adelphia. When it craps out I sometimes have to attach a two-way signal amplifier to get it gain synch again. Fortunately it's been solid for many months now. Should be interesting to see what happens when Comcast takes over our area.

[GadgetGav]

OK Mac-heads... some help needed here.
When I last looked last night the Cube was on, but asleep, connected to a UPS (no, not the brown truck). When I got home today it was off, probably because the contractors unplugged it from the UPS by mistake. When I boot it back up, I get the grey screen with the Apple logo, then the starting OS X window with the blue progress bar (which fills quickly) then the blue screen that the login dialog should come up on, only the login dialog never appears.
I tried zapping the PRAM, I tried resetting the NVRAM, I booted from my Tiger CD and repaired permissions, I verified the disk (it was OK), I even booted into single user mode and ran fsck and that said the disk was OK too. And still it gets to the blue screen and nothing happens. I can hear a bit of disk activity for a while, but nothing comes up. If I hit Apple-Option-Escape it chimes so it's alive to some extent. When I was in single user mode I tried the option of booting but staying in that mode (something like sh /etc/rv) and in all the stuff that spewed onto the screen, the last thing was an error about the mDNS something or other and it said it was giving up on something. It seemed to have hung too so I had to ctrl-c.
Thinking that it might be something to do with the network, I opened it up and took out and reseated the Airport card, but the boot still ended the same way - with the blacnk blue screen. It's been like that for an hour now, so I don't think anything is going to come up...

Any ideas..???

Didn't know about the shift key safe mode... that brings up the login screen and I can log in from it. What's the difference between that and a normal boot..? Just trying a reboot now...

[GadgetGav]

OK, that's weird.
Once I'd logged in through safe mode, I immdiately logged out and rebooted normally and everything was normal. Anyone know what the safe mode boot does that all those other checks don't do..?

[GBMINI]

It's probably a virus ...

[GBMINI]

[GadgetGav]

Quote: Originally Posted by GBMINI

It's probably a virus ...

Didn't I address my original concern to Mac-heads..?!?!
Maybe they're all asleep....

[snid]

Not asleep, just not on-line...

Now that things look okay, it's not as vital to get it "fixed". Check out the logs from the time(s) it was behaving badly. Applications/Utilities/Console. Chances are system.log will be the most usefull, but there are a few dozen other logs hanging around too. It's all timestamped, so you should be able to narrow in on when the strange stuff happened.

Post your logs and we might be able to figure something out. Just double-check before you post some information you might not want to.

Unfortunately, it's "normal" for there to be lots of messages in the logs that look like errors. But there still might be a vital clue in there somewhere.

[Cape Cod MINI]

Quote: Originally Posted by GadgetGav

OK Mac-heads... some help needed here.

Any ideas..???
...

The only thing that comes instantly to mind.......