linux to an imac: 2002/05: jaguar::hang on boot

Ho-hum --- for the first time ever, perhaps, I am excited about - oh, okay, anticipating with a tinsy glint - an update to an OS. Specifically, did-dah-duuuh code-name Jaguar , the next version of OS X. With quotes such as "First impression after install: It's f-a-s-t. Very, very fast." and "it makes me feel like I live in the future.", who can blame me?. (OTOH, shaving myself from head to toe and dressing entirely in tight, white astro-linen would also produce the same future-feeling ..)

I won't even mind paying for it. Oh dear I've turned into a Mac Bigot.

2002-05-02 21:23 / hang on boot »

Ooh - I managed to get the OS to hang completely on boot, with the message "Initializing Network". Single user mode (cmd-c) was a little more verbose with the actual hang after the message "Setting host identifier" - this coming from a shell script - /System/Library/StartupItems/Network/Network - where, as it says, it is trying to convert the ip from dotted form to single integer, through use of sed and ifconfig and - ah-ha! head ... the opposite of tail, not the HEAD that I had just installed through lwp and perl, a HEAD that had overwritten the original head because of case-insenstive HFS+. And my not making sure things were going in /usr/local, of course.

So, get the spanky package manager from GNU OS X, install the textutils package, and you have the old head back again as /usr/local/bin/ghead.

I think it was the call to sysctl -w kern.hostid=${hostid}, with some broken value of hostid, that caused the hang.