Mac OS 10.5.7 Update: Smooth updates 2, Bad updates 1
So 10.5.7 came out yesterday, and being the Mac geek that I am, I immediately fired up Software Update at bedtime and updated the iMac at home. Went without a hitch, and this morning it was running smoothly.
“So,” I thought, “that went well. I’ll start updating the Mac minis at work.”
Still feeling somewhat cautious, I decided to update only one mini. We have an Xserve that acts as the host for all the workstations for Software Update. (Because I cannot in good conscience let each mini waste bandwidth by downloading the update over the internet.) I sshed into the one guinea-pig workstation, and did sudo softwareupdate -ia. Everything went fine, and I got the expected “You have installed one or more updates that requires that you restart your
computer. Please restart immediately.” message.
I tried a remote reboot with sudo reboot, but suddenly the workstation would no longer accept my admin password for sudo. I logged out of the ssh session, then tried to ssh back in. No go. Apparently after the update it disabled logins, including sudo. Okay, cool. So I went to the mini and hit the reboot button on the login window.
Oh noes, boot loop!
Screen is first blue, then I get the processing gear, then the screen displays patterns like VRAM corruption, then blue screen, then processing gear, then VRAM patterns, then blue… ad infinitum.
I rarely have problems with installs, but I guess my luck finally ran out. I did a hard reboot by holding down the power button, let the workstation reboot. Success!
Yay me. However the rest of the workstations will get the full “Repair permissions, install combo updater, repair permissions” process tonight. Thanks, MacFixIt!
UPDATE: Second mini updated fine using the “Repair Perms-Combo Update-Repair Perms” process. Did have one small glitch where some receipt printers on the two workstations had some defaults reset, but they’re fine now. I’ll update the rest and the server on Friday!
