Classic and the Need to Force Quit in Jag

[hschickel]

On a large number of machines that I manage the Classic environment will not shut down on it's own but needs to be force quit. The following things will sometimes help:

1. Reboot in OS9 - will cure the problem for a bit.
2. Reset the permissions so the the whole Classic System Folder is writable (I'm generally loathe to do this and oddly it does not work every time.)
3. Delete and allow Classic to reinstall the Classic installed components.

Oddly - a restart from the extension manager always works without a force quit. This leads me to believe that this is an OSX issue or a permissions issue of some sort. Possibly an OSX installed item is getting corrupted somehow.

More oddly - this only seems to happen on Jag machines - but it's happening on large numbers of them.

A note - on the machines that I manage Classic is a mostly stipped (nearly all extensions removed) vanilla Universal OS9 install. Some machines have Adobe Acrobat 4 (with the appropriate extensions) and some have local printer driver extensions as needed. Neither of these are consistent with the problem machines.

I'm tempted to just allow and encourage the force quits for the next few months as we faze out Classic but I have 2 issues with this:

1. Classic often does not respect permissions and I fear that corrupt Classic apps could destabilize the systems.

2. i'm curious. This problem is new to Jag and I'd like to know what's causing it.

Does anyone have any input, thoughts or similar experiences that might help in isolating this?

Thanks,
Hugh

[Craig R. Arko]

Haven't run across that one, but sometimes after shutting down Classic there is a zombie TruBlu process owned by root that gets left over. Restarting has been the answer to that as well.

I think you're right that it's a permissions issue and that Classic does some flaky things with respect to that. Rebooting in 9 is also said to whack permissions.

I'll ask the obligatory 'are you running 9.2.2?', but you probably have tried that already.

[hschickel]

Bleeding edge on everything. :)

I'm shocked that no one else sees this. It's hit most of my jag machines at one point or another.

Hugh

[mervTormel]

hmm, and nothing in the logs?

i wonder if there's any common wonky 3rd party OSX doohickey you have installed on all of your clients.

though i'd like to suspect permissions, it seems that that would manifest itself differently than a hang.

hugh, when you say "a restart from the extension manager always works without a force quit," do you mean ( restart ) classic from the OSX classic pref pane?

in classic prefs, do you have enabled ? :

[x] start classic when you login

[x] use prefs from home folder

put classic to sleep at some time interval other than never?

etc...

and when you say "Classic is a mostly stripped (nearly all extensions removed) vanilla Universal OS9 install," do you mean, that after a vanilla OS9 install, you removed extensions and control panels? or that you just left it vanilla?

[hschickel]

merv,

The logs the logs - I did not even think of that as the problem was with Classic. Did not think it would log. Will do that posthaste...

No hang - just can't quit or restart from the Classic pane of System Prefs. Odd thing is I can do a restart from the Classic control panel "Extension Manager." Thus I think it's maybe a permissions issue.

Many wonky things - will be tough to isolate - maybe Classic Spy - but I never use that to quit Classic - I get the impression it's not a clean shutdown...

Classic does not start on login and I use the standard prefs folder.

Classic never sleeps.

Plain vanilla is a custom install. Universal installation. Minimal set of extensions / control panels. System folder is about 130MB. Classic is up in about 10 seconds on the new G4 iMacs and about 30 seconds on the old G3 iMacs. Pared down even further when running as Classic via Extension Manager. This is not the issue as the problem manifests regardless of the extension set and the machines will be fine for days and then the problem begins.

Tis a mystery...

Hugh

[AKcrab]

I will confirm Hugh's problem. I have the same issue, at random, with both user on my rig. I just force quit and move on, but I'll take a closer look at my logs next time it happens.

Here's to the day classic dies a horrible death.

Just waiting for an OS X Terminal app with programmable function keys.