Bunch of Adobe CC apps stop responding
 

I'd be grateful if anyone can guide me thru this problem. Anyone checking my previous posts will soon see that I'm no techie - but I have no IT support at work, being the only Mac in a PC environment.

And the problem is this: apps that used to run fine in the past now freeze after, say, an hour or two. Makes no difference if I'm using them or not. InDesign is a particular culprit. I've run Disk Utility with no real dramas reported back (even when booting from a different startup disk). I've got 35gb of HDD space left on my startup drive. I've tried using Activity Monitor, but can't see any culprits when the apps lock up.

Not sure if this is relevant, but I'm having all sorts of issues connecting to the LAN/emails. Seems that Macs don't get on with Active Directory (whatever that is). I wonder if the Mac is timing out on some network issue?

I'm not expecting anyone to solve the problem - but would appreciate any ideas that I could try to progress - before I tear the rest of my hair out!

Look at the logs in Console utility, and see if any relevant messages are being left at the time of the freeze.
Do they recover from the freeze, if left - overnight?

35GB of space left is not much. You really want to increase that free space or get a bigger disk. The rule of thumb is at least 10% free, but on smaller drives I'd want more than that.

Cheers Benwiggy - I hadn't even used the Console app before. Interesting.
I've had a look inside, but am seriously out of my comfort zone with the messages. I have no clue what they mean - but it does look as though the Mac is trying to accomplish something.

I've taken out the Mac IP reference in the following string (out of paranoia), but am mystified as to what it all means....

Jul 21 11:40:00 : can't create keychain, status = -67671
Jul 21 11:40:00 : Deleted keychain /Library/Keychains/apsd.keychain
Jul 21 11:40:00 : can't create keychain, status = -67671
Jul 21 11:40:00 : Keychain not ready, unable to provision client certificate
Jul 21 11:40:00 : can't create keychain, status = -67671
Jul 21 11:40:00 : <APSCertificateManager: 0x7ff611529c30>: Failed to get client cert on attempt 1168, will retry in 900 seconds
Jul 21 11:40:01 dnslauncher[72543]: ERROR: send_all(29) wrote -1 of 4 errno 32 (Broken pipe)
Jul 21 11:40:05 --- last message repeated 1 time ---

The apsd stuff in the log seems unrelated.

Look for errors related to the apps that freeze and in general at the time they hang.

Are the Adobe apps up to date?
Did you check with Adobe tech support?

What kind of network issues are those?
Logging in using AD or global connectivity as in unable to browse the web?

What kind of "no real drama" kind of problems did Disk Utility find?

Voldenuit - good questions. Sorry, I should've been more specific.

The Adobe apps are all the latest CC ones, and on the Adobe forums the consensus is that it's not Adobe but my Mac. No-one else reports this behaviour, so I came here.

As for networking issues, it seems that I can browse the internet ok, but periodically access to assorted network volumes drops until I log out/in again. And my Outlook email locks out pretty much every day. The IT dept just reset the password, time after time.

Disk Utility showed some prefs with the wrong permissions, but they're for apps I rarely use.

Do the Adobe apps open documents on the server?
If so, do the hangs also occur if you work on local documents only?

Very good point. I'm starting to feel a bit stupid for not pointing this out....
But all my work is local. I only use the servers for transferring print-ready PDFs and assorted documents. All artwork, links, apps and resources are local to this Mac.

Appreciate your help!

Perhaps network or DNS issues (outside your control)?
The adobe apps need to phone home occassionally to verify your license is good. If IT has a filter on the network blocking those requests, then the apps might sit there waiting for a response (not sure).
If you know the address of Adobe's activation servers, it should be something you can test for using ping.

Thanks cpragman. I'll check that - but I heard the Adobe apps only phone home once or twice a month (but perhaps that's just apocryphal).

Looking at the console info, it seems more likely that it's some sort of DNS error:
21/07/2014 12:22:28.648 dnslauncher[72543]: ERROR: send_all(24) wrote -1 of 4 errno 32 (Broken pipe)
21/07/2014 12:22:28.648 dnslauncher[72543]: ERROR: send_all(24) wrote -1 of 4 errno 32 (Broken pipe)


Impossible for you guys to check what's going on remotely. I guess I'll have to ask my boss for a Mac doctor local to my work :-(

This all points to some sort of network issue to me.

Are you attached directly from Ethernet to your company network using DHCP?
Check new cable/ask network engineer to check/monitor your port and see if any issues.

Are you part of Active Directory ?
open this program and see /System/Library/CoreServices/Directory Utility.app

I presume your company network is mycompany.local ?

Have you checked your time is correct ?

Pretty much looks that way from the post directly above yours.

--

You might want to check whether DNS works for the various servers adobe uses to validate licenses. Here's a partial list:

prefixed by a ping command to paste -line-by-line- into the Terminal.

If you get a reply such as
ping -c1 -t1 activate.adobe.com
PING activate.adobe.com (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes

--- activate.adobe.com ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss

that would mean this could be part of the problem.
It might get filtered by either a firewall or a split-horizon DNS.

You guys just ROCK. You know that?
I'm snowed with crazy deadlines right now, but will check this stuff out just as soon as I can.

BRILLIANT!

you may need to delete some entires in your /etc/hosts file using a Text editor like Textwranagler.
I will say no more.

Also please post how you connect to your network, as i thought you posted about having 2 network connections 1 to a NAS and 1 to network ?
May not have been you.

You are quite correct - that's either a remarkable memory, or else I'm actually quite right to be paranoid... :-)

This Mac has two ethernet ports, one goes to the network, the other goes to the NAS

It's your cranky malformed setup that is causing all the issues ;-)
And it was memory

Don't hold back... say what you really think here! :-)

;-) lol i am a syadmin and have to deal with people like you...day in day out...

"people like you"... I presume you must mean us awesome creative powerhouses, hampered only by systems that keep letting us down.....

For those that are puzzled, the screenies show my setup. Feel free to pour scorn on my lack of tech knowledge (sniff, whimper)

Ok i remember now Ethernet 2 is your business network and should be at top like it is so thats all good.
Lets see a SS of Ethernet 1 with all IP details. There is no sensitive data here.
Also are you using internet sharing etc ?

Are you also running a compatible version of Parallels with mavericks ?

Cheers matey. SS attached.
Sorry I'm such a dunce!

np. its all voodoo you know ;-)

Ok is your search domain on business network my company.local ?
Are the DNS servers listed in the range 10.139.5.XX IP range ?
ie. internal DNS servers or external DNS servers ?

Ethernet 1 is a self signed IP address ie. NO IP or routing which would be expected for a NAS directly plugged in. Having DNS servers entered here is pointless as their is no route to internet through the NAS anyway. Most NAS by default come preconfigured with an IP address.
Can you login to NAS and find this out and post a SS ? look up name of NAs and default address ;-)

Just a quick reply... really appreciate you putting the effort in to help. But I'm stuck churning ads out til wayyy later. I'll try to get answers for you tomorrow morning.

Thanks!
Dave

in your own time ;-)

We see off-site easynet.co.uk DNS-servers configured for a self-assigned IP, it presumably set from the other, DHCP-provisoned interface. So, most probably, no split horizon.

I personally think it will be Active directory windows servers on his primary interface, maybe 2 of them that forward/cache requests.

Big Dave, I'm sorry to say you're dealing with a set of issues which regrettably have not found remedies, although there are steps which may relieve some of the symptoms.

There's a passel of folks echoing your experiences with e-mail glitches, connection problems with SMB servers and with NAS devices, Active Directory network woes, ACL permissions issues, InDesign frustrations and more on the "Mavericks File Sharing Tips & Reports" page at http://www.macwindows.com/mavericks-filesharing.html.

In brief, 1.) Mavericks does not behave as well on Windows-oriented networks as did previous incarnations of OS X; and 2.) InDesign's file problems are a separate issue specific to use on Macintoshes, and unrelated to any network environment.

Hi Ambrose and Dave.

I would agree there are issues. However i have 100s of machines integrated into AD setups however there were many things that needed to be adjusted on both sides of coin and every environment is different. The key thing was shares are often setup with "change permissions" ACL many lazy windows admins have this on as it can lead to smoother running shares. This is a big no no IMHO. Coupled with Apple's SMB2 implementation being far from perfect and has caused a whole load of headaches.
I suppose at a few sites we were lucky to still have ExtremeZ-IP(AFP on windows) which on the whole is very reliable. We have had to at some sits force SMB1 connections to get things working and had to adjust shares on windows side to play nice. Gernally of course this is only when maybe 10%+ of fleet are having issues.

Firstly we do not use Apples built in Apps Mail, Contacts, Cal with Exchange.
We have been bitten so many times with different versions having quirks and updates breaking things in our Exchange environments that we only use Outlook 2011 or OWA in browser for Mac Users. This is not to say it does not work, but Apple had a habit of breaking things and the support mayhem outweighed allowing use in In-house/hosted solutions.

I am very used to integration of many platforms, many IT professionals are not as forthcoming are used to this and unfortunately windows admins can be one of the most stubborn to change/or help even when presented with solutions.

Oh and Adobe Apps are still a monumental PITA !

Indeed they are.
Anybody trying to use HSFX (the case-sensitive incarnation of HFS+) has Adobe on his
first-to-the-wall-when-the-revolution-came-list.

Seriously, how hard can it be to keep up consistent capitalisation of what's in your app-bundle?
And there is some Unix source-code, such as qmail, which requires a case-sensitive FS.

But I digress, hopefully BigDave will be able to figure that one out.

To test for AD being the problem, you could try to pull the ethernet cable on the big network.
You can do that just before leaving the office in the evening as the freezes occur without any interaction.
If the problem goes away, it's network-related.

I think it is an authorisation issue. We had one site time bomb when Adobe was down a few weeks ago. 20 people not being able to work using Adobe apps for nearly a day before we found a workaround.

I wonder how many cleverly administered sites install applications with overly zealous and error-prone licensing models using methods developped by the cracker-community.
Legally you're in the clear as you paid for the license, yet you're no longer bothered by such hard-to-debug issues.

Lol this was Creative Cloud ;-) but i have wasted at least 10% of my IT time on bad licensing ;-)