MacNoob

I received my copy of Aperture 2 from Apple today and could not wait to get it installed.  In doing so I crossed over my self-imposed free disk space threshold of 20 gigs.  I bought the largest 7200 RPM hard disk available when I purchased my Macbook Pro, 160 GB.  At first I was amazed by how lean the whole OS X environment was with regards to disk usage.  Being accustomed to Windows [where bloatware is the norm], I couldn’t believe how much free space I had after installing everything I could think of.  Vista Ultimate on a 30 GB Bootcamp partition, MS Office 2008, my entire music collection, Firefox, Google Earth, Gimp…the list went on and on and I still had over 65 GB free.  Not until I installed Logic Studio 8 did I even concern myself with disk space.  Logic took almost 25 gigs and I installed most of the loop library on an external drive!  So at that point (three months ago) I still had over 35 gigs available.  You know how it is though, freeware, additional music, a few iDVD projects and “disk creep” was becoming a factor.

I really prefer to do “complete” installs of most software because I hate to go digging for a DVD or CD when a feature I want to try is an optional one I didn’t think was necessary at the time.  This Aperture 2 full install left me with less disk space than I’m comfortable with.  Maybe it’s my Windows upbringing, but I like a little more “elbow room” than 20 gigs.  (Can you imagine how stupid that statement would have sounded five years ago?)  It was decision time.  Something had to go!  I decided to do a little investigating, so I rebooted into Vista to see how long it had been since I last used it.  The fact that I didn’t remember how long should have been answer enough.  The first thing Vista told me was that my anti-virus files were out of date.  The last update was in December of 2007!  End of investigation.  I thought, “If I haven’t booted to Windows in over four months, I don’t need it that badly“.  Still, there was an anxious moment of indecisiveness when Disk Utility asked me if I was sure I wanted to delete the Windows partition.  In the end, I took the leap of faith.  No more Windows on my Mac.  I could almost hear Darth Vader saying, “Your transition to the dark side is now complete“.

Maybe I’m dense, but I can’t seem to get network shares, wired or wireless to work consistently in Leopard.  When I was using Tiger everything just worked.  I could connect to network-attached storage, shared folders on other PCs (Windows, Mac or Linux) shared printers, everything.  Leopard is a different animal though.  Pardon the pun.  Sometimes, I double-click on a network share in Finder and I’m connected like normal.  Sometimes though, the shared device doesn’t even show up.  Other times, I can connect, use the share but then it inexplicably disappears.  Every now and then I have to use the Go: Connect to server… menu to manually connect to a share.  Every Windows PC on my network seems fat, dumb and happy.  Vista and XP can see and use everything.  My neighbor still runs Tiger on his Macbook, and it works perfectly on his network and mine.  I’m not completely clueless when it comes to networking, I’m a MCSE, but there is obviously something going on behind the scenes in Leopard that I haven’t figured out yet.  Am I alone?  What about all this “Out of the box useability” Apple braggs about?

I hate the “switcher” label. It implies that someone using a Mac for the first time has abandoned all other platforms entirely. I do love my Macbook Pro, but I still have four other Windows machines in my home, two of them running Vista Ultimate, and I really like them also. I think it has become fashionable to dump on Vista. Quite frankly, I’m getting a bit bored by all of it. The “main” PC in the MacNoob household is a Dell Core2 Duo and Vista works just as well on it as OS X does on my Macbook Pro. In fact, there are many aspects of Windows I find superior to OS X. Not to say OS X isn’t a fine platform, it is, its just that Windows has its’ strengths and OS X does too. What are they, you ask? First, Windows is upgradeable. If I want a bigger hard drive, I just install it. If I want a new video card, same story. If I want to add more firewire or eSATA ports, I just slip the new card in and bingo! With these pluses come the minuses. Drivers can sometimes be an issue. This is where I think Vista got its bad rap. The hardware manufacturers were woefully tardy delivering Vista drivers. Subsequently, lots of people wound up with printers that wouldn’t print, video cards that wouldn’t display properly and a host of other gizmos that worked fine with XP but gave Vista headaches. The same people who trash Vista now must have forgotten what a pain XP was when it first released. Now that Vista has been out for a while, PC makers have caught up nicely and things just work right out of the box. My Dell typically runs for weeks without error or need to otherwise restart. The key to the Mac’s stability is the absolute authoritarian nature of Apple. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, period. Most people don’t know or care to know what an infinitely smaller problem set that is for an operating system manufacturer to code for. For all you Mac fanboys out there, flexibility and stability are trade-offs! Given the virtual cornucopia of hardware combinations Vista runs on, its a miracle the OS will boot at all! Apple has done a marvelous job creating a sleek and sexy lineup of machines that run very well. To be an Apple user, however, YOU MUST COMPLY!
I bought my Macbook Pro the day Leopard was released but it came with Tiger pre-installed. I ran Tiger only briefly (about two weeks) until my Leopard disk arrived. Guess what, when I upgraded to Leopard my DAW software and firewire mixer quit working altogether. It took Alesis, the firewire mixer manufacturer, almost three months to get the first beta driver published. Steinbergh, the DAW publisher, didn’t have a working version of Cubase for leopard until late February. I heard a few complaints about OS X in the first months, but they paled in comparison to the outright lynch-mob mentality prevalent in Vista editorials.
My Mac is a ton of fun to work with. It does what it does very well. Core animation and core audio are, in my opinion, better technologies than their Win32 counterparts. So, when I need to create and/or edit audio or video my Mac is my choice. For most other tasks I default to my Windows machines. It may be because I haven’t figured out how to do some of those tasks on my Mac yet. Time will tell.

Well, it’s conclusive, the problem with my network attached storage issue is a problem with Leopard.  Linksys (i.e. Cisco) has done what I consider their due diligence.  They were able to fully reproduce my problem in their lab when using a Leopard machine, but when they used Tiger, everything worked fine.  The engineer I spoke with said they have been working on the problem since I reported it and couldn’t fix it.  What was really intriguing is the level of effort they put into the issue.  This Cisco engineer told me they had poured over the source code for the WRT600N firmware and found it to be 100% compliant with Apple’s Leopard API.  Even if they wanted to fix the problem, they wouldn’t know where to start.  I’ve been in their shoes before.  When coding to someone’s API you have to go on faith that the API does what it says.  If it doesn’t, you can’t fix a problem even if you know where it is.  Kudos to Cisco for giving it their best shot.  Even though my problem still exists, I will buy Linksys (Cisco) products in the future simply because of this experience.  I have never been involved with a support incident that garnered so much attention from the provider.  As for Apple?…Give me a hand. I called Apple’s tech support, and they weren’t much help but did agree to document my problem. I figure the more folks complain about this, the more likely it is to be addressed. Give Apple support a call at 1-800-APL-CARE (1-800-275-2273) if you’ve experienced network problems with Leopard.

Thanks,

MacNoob

More to come.

It looks like I was overly optimistic about Linksys’s determination to fix the permissions problem with the WRT600N.  Instead, they pointed the finger at Apple.  Apparently the problem I have is reproducible in Leopard, but works fine in Tiger.  Their conclusion, whether I believe it or not, is that the problem must be with the Leopard operating system.  That is certainly a defendable position, although not the one I’d hoped for.  I’ve posted my problem on Apple’s support forum so maybe someone will discover a fix.  One small consolation, Cisco is leaving the incident listed as “Open” for whatever that’s worth.

I got another call today from Cisco to simply say they were still working the issue and to apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.  I’d rather hoped for “We fixed it!”, but I’ll take what I can get.  At least I don’t feel like my problem has fallen into a black hole and I feel confident someone at Linksys is, at least, aware of the continuing problem.  The incident number is still listed as “open”.

To Tom’s comments:  I’ve tried every server connection available, ftp, smb and afp, all with the same results.  It seems Cisco has done the same with no more success than I’ve experienced.  Thanks for the interest, Tom.