modem freezeup
 

Problem: macos x is booted up more than about 15 hours. I try to connect to the internet using either Internet Connect or the dropdown modem connect menu on upper right of screen.

Result: mouse gets jerky, modem seems to freeze up and I can't do anything else in finder.

I believe this is known bug in macos x.

Has anyone else experienced this, or know when Apple will fix this?
I'm running 10.1.2

jk

Happened to me just tonight. What a pain! Sometimes it will come out of the freeze, but tonight I had to hit the reset button. So much for "multitasking" huh? Hopefully they'll fix it in 10.2

As far as I can say, it ALWAYS comes out of the freeze - one time I had to wait for more than 15 mins though. If you don't have unsaved docs that you would lose it's definitely faster to reset sometimes. (so much for the "uptime fanatics")

test
 

I have a theory that the problem exists between Macos X and some of the Apple modems in the older G-4s/G-3s
When I go into Compusa and do an uptime in terminal and find one that's been up more than 20 hours....I then try to launch internet connect and try to connect. Now I know it will throw up an error message but what I'm looking for is to see if I get the same freeze up I get on my home machine. So far I've checked it twice and not found a freezeup problem. Could you guys try this if you think of it? What I figure is that Apple is sitting back not fixing it because they are trying to push everybody into buying a new box. They aren't putting alot of resources into bugfixing that benefits the older boxen.

Thiz is kinda bad. Well, i hope someone discovers the bug and fix will be available soon.

maybe apple wants to push their users to buy DSL or cable ;)

pppd problem
 

I've had this problem since 10.01 or 10.02. It gets worse toward the end of the month. After the monthly crontab it gets better. So right now its a 10 min wait. Saturday it will be around 5 - 10 secs. This just has to be a problem in Internet connect or pppd or pppd's kernal extention. There just aren't that many things that will grind unix to a halt but we got stuck with one.

over at the apple boards, they've got a loooong thread discussing this and hearty attempts at solving it. it is of considered opinion that there is not a consistent work around. and, as macubergeek mentions, there are missives on the apple board that suggest these are older machines and they may be neglected in the update.

http://discussions.info.apple.com/We...4@.ef9dcc0/210

lamentably, -mt

people,

"use verbose logging" ?

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106447

what are the results of enabling verbose logging? does it just echo the modem commands and results to the log file?

bug confirmed
 

ok I've gone to my friendly local mac dealer and have verified the modem kernel bug. I checked uptime from the command line 2 days x hours, on one machine running X and 18 hours on another.
Launched internet connect, put the icon for modem connect in the menubar and launched modem connect. No problem whatsoever. All I got was an error about no dial tone (neither machine was connected to a phone line).

I'm reasonably sure this is a modem bug with G-3s and early sawtooth G-4s

According to my dealer, at this time Apple was using Global Village card modems which they had alot of issues with even under 9.

Just saw a new iMac...awesome machine, very slick, and comes with two decent harmon/kardon ball speakers.
I know what my next macine will be.:D

Monthly housekeeping
 

Hey its Saturday Feb 2.

Internet connect hooked me up almost instantly.

Uptime is only 18 days but that seems to be a long time to the freezing bug.

Yesterday it took about 10 mins before it would dial out.

So what happened?

The MONTHLY crontab run.
Doing login accounting:
Rotating log files:
and a kill -HUP of everything in /var/run/syslog.pid

Guess I'll wait till the problem gets bad again and try one of these on its own.:cool:

I'm not seeing what you are seeing
 

My problem is that I run a first gen sawtooth with a Global Village modem card in it. I myself don't see any time-of-the-month variance, but I'll retest tonight and see if it's any different. Thanks for the heads up.

It's Back
 

Well that didn't last long.

Up to 3 min already. At least its not 10 min or longer.

Still totally unacceptable.:mad:

What machine are you using?
 

WillyT What generation machine are you using? G-3 or G4?

Oh. I have a G4 400MHz AGP graphics.

10G
Macintosh HD - OS 9.0.4 - OMS MIDI
SWAP - for vm

60G
Big-Bear - OS 9.2 Classic
Cinemascope - mostly .mov and .swf
Decadent - OS 10.1.2
Fat-City - downloads
Users - symbolic linked from Decadent NO changes to Netinfo
Antares - graphic and audio

Using Fink

Modified system files
using fstab and moved mount-remaining script in /etc/rc for swapfile
/etc/hostconfig - set hostname and made a copy of localhost and renamed it in Netinfo Manager
/etc/printcap - modifications for lpr

No other CRITICAL mods that I know of.

I'm not quite sure what "sawtooth" means other than /|/|/|/| waveform?

generation duh
 

Well it's just as I suspected, your machine is very close in age to mine. According to my local Apple reseller, Apple was using an internal modem at the time that X now has problems with. I believe it came from Global Village and it had issues. X hasn't been tweaked enough yet to accommodate it. The upcoming 10.1.3 update is supposed to fix the eternal revolving beachball cursor problem. I believe this means that they've reset the process timeout soooo that should mean that if the modem has a problem initializing, we'll be able to break out of it quicker.

For what it's worth, I have this problem too (G4 400mghz Powerbook Titanium) but it seems to get better after a restart. Go figure. But I hope an update to OS X will fix it.

First of the month
 

Well it sounds like we will have a solution RSN.

Since monthly crontab things are much better again.

For last 4 tries:
0 sec
3 min
0 sec
0 sec

Oh and just to see if I can catch it I'm running top just before I connect.

top -u -s 300

This seems to be 30.0 sec
Hope that top is actually getting some time slices do it can work.
:cool:

that top command don't look too very good. are you trying to catch this hang process?

try:

% top -ud -s5 -l36 15 > ~/toppy.out

that'll give you a scan of [ relative deltas to previous samples ] of the top 15 cpu-eaters at the end of every five seconds for 3 minutes redirected to toppy.out for later perusal.

the last arg to top is number of processes to sample

lemme know if that's a better peek at process behavior for this problem.

pppd hog
 

Merv
I took about a 20 to 30 second hit this morning but had your args running top. Here is pertinent info:

This data is one second after clock stopped at 09:31:21
Processes: 54 total, 3 running, 51 sleeping... 144 threads 09:31:22
Load Avg: 1.01, 0.66, 0.46 CPU usage: 22.5% user, 20.5% sys, 57.0% idle
Networks: 0 ipkts/0K 0 opkts /0K
Disks: 0 reads/0K 0 writes/0K
VM: 0 pageins 0 pageouts
25554 Internet C 0.0% 26:32.55 0 0/0 0/0 314/40 45
Nothing else interesting.

But top skipped for 20 seconds!
Processes: 55 total, 2 running, 53 sleeping... 144 threads 09:31:42
Load Avg: 1.85, 1.25, 0.92 CPU usage: 1.3% user, 98.7% sys, 0.1% idle
Networks: 0 ipkts/0K 0 opkts /0K
Disks: 0 reads/0K 2 writes/1K
VM: 0 pageins 0 pageouts
And here is the culprit
25554 Internet C 0.0% 26:32.56 0 0/0 13/10 64/31 11
3256 pppd 0.0% 0:19.22 0 0/0 0/0 0/0 0
Almost 20 seconds all to itself bad pppd baaaaaad pppd.

Its using almost every last cycle for itself.
Now if top is 3254 and pppd is 3256 what was 3255?

As you can see from previous post my freeze times are down FOR THE MOMENT.
Uptime is 23 days.

From my previous experience with a preemptive system (15 years with Amiga computers at home) this sort of thing only happens with runnaway (or stuck in a loop) supervisor code or by forbiding multitasking. Both were considered rude and bad practice except for all out benchmark speed tests.

This looks really scarey because of the disk writes. I don't know how critical system timing is for disk access. Also don't know if this was top or something else.