I just found var/system.log! Oh my god this unix stuff is so cool. If I knew what I was doing I could probably solve a lot of problems by looking through these logs. Even without knowing much I think I figured out what was going wrong with my PPP connection today. This makes what I do to troubleshoot older Macs look like a large order of mumbo-jumbo with a side of fuzzy intuition. Throw out the prefs and pray. Check for damaged fonts and pray. Drag the system folder off its drive and back (and pray.) Throw out objectsupportlib (again) and pray. With OS X I can go in and actually see what is happening. Knowing what to do after you see what is happening is another story, of course, but at least we are in the realm of science. Knowing how to keep pre-X Macs running is more like superstition. I know the incantations to chant, and I've got my various rabbits feet at the ready, but knowing that stuff never taught me anything about how the system really works in there. It seems like I won't be able to help learning a lot about how unix works by learning to run the system. Or maybe I'm just carried away by the novelty of it all...
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- jim 10-05-2000 11:22 pm