Snow Leopard 10.6.0 client DNS problems

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It would appear that Snow Leopard 10.6.0 has an issue with client-sideDNS resolution. Symptoms include erratic resolution of domain names from local network DNS servers for any command or application using gethostbyname(). However, using the host or nslookup commands resolve things correctly.

The current best resource for this issue is a thread on the Apple support forums. There are all kinds of suggestions as to what the problem is and all kinds of voodoo fixes, though none have been found to work for most (or all). I’d hold off on attempting these untill 10.6.1 rolls out, which will be in the near future.

In the meantime, i’d suggest using your /etc/hosts file for must-have names. Keeping an eye on that thread may shed further light on the situation as the problem is investigated in greater detail.

EVE Online on Snow Leopard

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After a few hours of play, it seems like EVE on Snow Leopard brings anoticeable improvement on several fronts. First and foremost, there is a definite increase in framerate and performance with multiple clients open. I can not quantify this scientifically (or am too lazy to do so).

One of the other things that I’m really hyped about is that this brand new Macbook Pro runs a lot cooler with two EVE clients opened with a dual-head setup. I have always had to run SMCFancontrol to maintain a reasonable CPU temp, and still have to do so. However, instead of getting up over 70C and having the aluminum case heat up above and below the GPU/CPU, it now runs below 60C and stays reasonable cool on the outside. Big win here if not just for peace of mind.

I did see one crash while running two clients, but this can be expected periodically. I’m not sure if it’s Snow Leopard related or just EVE funkage. All in all, EVE runs just fine on Snow Leopard.

Fun with MDSChannelPeerCreate errors on Mac OS X Server

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We started experiencing AFP problems and general instability on one ofour Mac OS X servers today. AFP locked up and sucked a lot of resources, caused some bogus error messages in the logs. Kept getting this in particular:

AppleFileServer[4806] MDSChannelPeerCreate: (os/kern) invalid argument

It looks like this may be due to a permissions problem on one of the root drives our AFP server is making available to clients. Looking at the files within the .fseventsd directory on the drive’s mount point, I noticed that everything beneath .fseventsd was owned by root:unknown. Recursively chown’ing this to root:staff and setting permissions to 770 seems to have stopped the errors and returned stability after restarting AFP.

This was one of those problems that Googling didn’t yield a good answer to initially. I really had to dig and though I’d post this up for others to see. Make sure you post a comment if this helped you.

MacPorts Python 2.6 + Snow Leopard

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I just thought I’d provide a friendly heads up to the Django and Pythoncommunities that the Python 2.6 distributed with MacPorts does not compile on Snow Leopard as of now. This issue is outlined on MacPorts ticket #20284.

There are some really hacky work-arounds, but they are not for the feint of heart. This is reportedly an upstream Python problem, and has been reported as such by the MacPorts community. While Python 2.6 is included with Snow Leopard, MacPython requires its own Python26 package for many other things.

Other than that, Snow Leopard has been great. This is not a complete show-stopper since you can just manually install stuff, but it is somewhat annoying.