The Shine is Off the Apple

Now even though I am a big convert to the world of the Mac and even though I have replaced all of my PCs with Macs, I am under no delusion that the Mac or OS X or even Steve Jobs is somehow descended from Heaven. Steve's just a guy like me, and the Mac and OS X are just systems created by people and are subject to failure. Yeah, I know that borders on heresy, but it's true.

I have been using Macs for over a year and I have not had any of the oddities or issues that seem to plague Windows systems. For the most part I turn on my Mac, it quickly boots up, does what I need it to do and quickly turns off when I am done. Updates go in without a hitch and we just move on... that was until I updated to 10.5.5.

Here is my scenario. I have a Mac Pro at work that I have bound to Active Directory (AD) and I am logging on with my AD credentials. After upgrading to 10.5.5, I started getting Kernel Panics (KP) usually when either logging off or restarting my Mac. I did some research and didn't find much, but I did find that at least one person was relating this back to his mounting of SMB shares to Windows computers.

I have an Applescript that I use to mount three different shares, plus my windows "home" folder gets mounted as well. As a test, I took the Applescript out of my login items and the instances of KP dropped, but didn't go away. I also removed the mounting of my windows home folder. As long as I didn't do anything on any Windows share from my Mac I was OK. However, the problem still occurred because anytime I would access any Office document with Office for the Mac it mounts a share in Finder. I can make the KP happen by either mounting or unmounting a Windows share... usually only takes 2-3 times of doing this to make the KP happen.

I called Apple and the tech support person and I worked through a number of things. He even had me do an Archive and Install back to my original version (10.5.2). At this level I was unable to reproduce the problem. As soon as I did the combo update to 10.5.5, the problem recurred. We did discover that if I was logged in as a local user I could not get the problem to occur, but as soon as I logged back in as an AD user the problem occurred. I also tried logging in as a different AD user and I still got the problem.

So the problem seems to be a combination of a Mac bound to AD, logging in as an AD user, having 10.5.5 as the OS, and mounting SMB shares to a Windows server.

Their next suggestion was to do an Erase and Install, but I don't have the time to do that kind of surgery on OS X. So, I went to another Mac that I have as a test box and installed 10.5.5 fresh on it, bound it to AD and then logged in with my AD user... got the problem... glad I didn't go through the pain of an Erase and Install.

Right now there appears to be two fixes. One is to unbind AD and login as a local user. You can still mount shares by providing AD credentials for authentication to the shares and then save them in your keychain so it isn't a major pain. The other fix, if you have already upgraded to 10.5.5, is to do an Archive and Install, patch the applications back up and then download and install the 10.5.4 combo update.

Please note that this is not an official Apple sanctioned fix. It's just what I have determined works for me in a consistent manner.