Recovering after an OS X update
Monday, 01 September 2008
After applying Security Update 2008-005 to an OS X laptop this past week, I rebooted the operating system as instructed and received the nice warm gray screen with animated progress circle… however it stuck around for over 5 minutes. Obviously something went wrong.
Sitting at my administrative workstation I:
- looked at Apple Remote Desktop and noticed that the troubled laptop on the network had an odd status and I could not connect graphically (not that it would help if I could)
- tried opening a terminal and ping‘ing. It responded.
- was able to ssh into the laptop. Running ‘top‘ showed that CrashReporter kept running.
I wondered if rebooting it would have any different effect, so I issued a quick “reboot” over ssh and gave it another shot. This boot had the same behavior… So I tried the standard recovery procedures when things act odd:
- Restart into single user mode and fsck
- Repair permissions
Still no change. The only other “best idea” I had was to try and install the update again… but since I couldn’t login graphically I had to go through the command line (Mac’s seem so much cooler since being built on top of Unix).
- Download Security Update 2008-005 (PPC) on the administrative workstation (target was a 700 MHz, PowerPC, iBook).
scp SecUpd2008-005PPC.dmg adminUser@host.fqdn:ssh adminUser@host.fqdnhdiutil attach ./SecUpd2008-005PPC.dmgsudo install -pkg "SecUpd2008-005PPC.pkg" -target /sudo reboot
The laptop rebooted, went past the animated progress circle and auto logged in to the user account it had so many times previously. That made me happy. 😉
