The Random OS X crashes …
I hate it when there starts a hidden process in the background, your hdd’s start spinning and rumbling and you don’t know whats happening. That doesn’t only happen in Linux (amarok http cache cleaner) or in Windows. This time it is Mac OS X and the funny thing is that one hidden process always crashed my system once or twice a day.
At first i thought i had to live with that problem. I looked into my /var/log/system.log and found this line:
cp: error processing extended attributes: Operation not permitted
Regarding this problem i found this neat guide for some completely different problem (last paragraph). In /usr/sbin/periodic you can find all the periodic hidden action that Mac OS X runs to maintain your system. Find the line with
cp /dev/null $tmp_output
and replace it with
> $tmp_output
Thats it, save and reboot. Funny thing is that Qumana crashed like 3 times while writing this post. I guess their spell check is still buggy.
Ok, the most wierd crash is on sudo periodic weekly .
I figured out that the command /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb crashes my system. The first fix was to disable it in the weekly.500 . I hope somebody can tell me why the database building for the locate command crashes on my system … My first guess is that i have too much hdd space to index and some cache is too small to hold the index while building.
So far i found these interesting articles:
Prevent locate’s update from updating certain folders
Make the locate command ignore certain directories
The last link worked. I made the locate-database-update ignore my /Volumes and now everything runs smooth.