Kicking a Dead Tiger

Since I’ve been cataloguing the various problems I’ve encountered with my Tiger installation, I have a new one to add to my list: Hitomi, my PowerMac won’t shutdown anymore. A shutdown request terminates the applications, the dock and the finder but then freezes, leaving my desktops sitting there with nothing on them.

This behavior began around the time I installed my Mercury Elite Pro and noticed it when I tried removing Intech’s SpeedTools. Ever since I’ve been shutting down the hard way: holding the power button until it shuts off. This is hardly ideal, but relatively safe with the journalled hard-drives.

This morning I felt brave and thought I’d investigate the problem further. A cursory look on Apple’s OS X Tiger Discussion Forum turned up a couple of hits on the word shutdown. My search turned up this thread and seems to describe what I was seeing.

I ssh’d into hitomi and ran ps auxw to see what was still running.

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
root 1857 0.0 -0.0 0 0 ?? Z 31Dec69 0:00.00 (shutdown)
…
rob 217 0.0 -0.0 0 0 ?? Z 31Dec69 0:00.00 (pbs)

Notably, were the two zombie processes shown here. Trying to kill pbs (the pasteboard server used to store clippings) would not do the trick.

I tried running sudo shutdown -r now just for kicks and got some more garbage spewed on the console.

System shutdown time has arrived
Stopping Network Information Service
Stopping Apache web server
/usr/sbin/apachectl stop: httpd (no pid file) not running
Stopping Adobe Version Cue …

[1] 2041
Using CATALINA_BASE: /Applications/Adobe Version Cue/tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME: /Applications/Adobe Version Cue/tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /Applications/Adobe Version Cue/tomcat/temp
Using JAVA_HOME: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
2005-09-01 08:25:30.360 openexec[2055] Process lock reports that another openexec is running on this host.
Process lock reports that another openexec is running on this host.
ntpd is not running.
Starting…
Sep 1, 2005 8:25:31 AM java.util.jar.Attributes read
WARNING: Duplicate name in Manifest: Class-Path
Done.
Catalina.stop: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:305)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:171)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:158)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:452)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:402)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:309)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:124)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.stop(Catalina.java:579)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.execute(Catalina.java:402)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.process(Catalina.java:180)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:324)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:203)
No matching processes were found

One of the posters in the above-mentioned thread did say that Adobe Version Cue was one of the culprits in the shutdown mess and it was clearly spitting out an error here. I didn’t realize that Version Cue used Tomcat and Java and am tempted to remove it since I never use it anyway. I have upgraded to Java 1.5 and this may have something to do with the errors listed above.

But, still no shutdown and pbs was still listed as a zombie in the process list. I saw in another thread, which I’ve since lost that a user having a similar problem was finding iTunes and the MIDI server zombied. I wasn’t seeing that here, but considered that it might be my firewire audio device or the harddrive I installed a couple of weeks ago. I made sure the drive was unmounted (it was) then powered it off and shutdown the RME Fireface, both of which are on my Firewire 800 bus. I ran shutdown again from the terminal and this time the machine went immediately to the blue screens and recycled.

So, I know Version Cue is producing some errors but I’m not sure that it’s the problem. The next time I do a shutdown, I’ll try shutting off the external drive and my audio interface first and see if that fixes it. There are some suspect Firewire error messages on the console.log and they have me a bit worried. All the horror stories of people losing the contents of their external drives is fairly disconcerting now that I’ve moved my iTunes library off of my system drive.

hitomi:~ rob$ sudo shutdown -r now
Shutdown NOW!
shutdown: [pid 2109]
hitomi:~ rob$
*** FINAL System shutdown message from rob@hitomi.local ***

System going down IMMEDIATELY
System shutdown time has arrived
Connection to hitomi closed by remote host.
Connection to hitomi closed.