As the “tech support guy” for Intrigue, I do a lot of maintenance on the workstations for the art department. By no means should this imply that we have considerable downtime. Rather it’s mostly proactive or preventative maintenance that is intended to PREVENT downtime.
My philosophy from a system support perspective is to stay on top of things BEFORE molehills turn into mountains. This applies to whatever brand or type of equipment that might be at hand. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Windows box or the latest and greatest Mac. They will all develop issues over time that will need to be addressed and fixed. It’s like normal wear and tear that comes from driving a car. Over time, a car will get nicks, scratches and dings – that’s to be expected if it gets driven on a daily basis. Oil does need to be changed at regular intervals to prevent having the engine fry itself.
Same thing with computers. Just by running them on a daily basis for hours on end, they WILL develop a problem or two (or three) over time. Knowing this, I try to make sure that our systems are frequently checked out. I do this because I have discovered that some problems can exist on a system before the user is even aware of it. To see what I mean, just peruse a random system log and it might raise a few eyebrows due to what it contains. By fixing things up while the problem has yet to be discovered by the computer’s user, it’s possible to potentially avert or minimize disk or file corruption that may stem from more serious issues.
This allows us to keep things humming along on most days. But even the best maintained systems will sometimes hit a wall and go down in a fiery crash and burn. Again, that’s perfectly normal to expect from a system that is generally used between 45 and 70 hours a week, every week like ours at Intrigue. We really push the limits of our Intel iMacs and other assorted Mac workstations. There are many hours spent processing killer multi-hundred megabyte Photoshop files and Quark XPress layouts. Yeah, it does take it’s toll. All it takes is just one digital “bit” to get flip-flopped and “boom!” – error messages start popping up like flies.
Like I said, the best and most efficient way to troubleshoot and fix a computer problem is to prevent the problem from happening in the first place. But when a crisis does happen and one of our Macs becomes a bit ornery, I get out my trusty “First Aid” kit. My kit consists of a portable hard drive (now two of them) that’s loaded with a bootable operating system as well as specialized utility software.
When necessary, I’ll boot up a Mac into what’s known as “Single User Mode”. That’s when the screen goes black during the boot, and all kinds of weird white text starts cascading down the screen. It’s almost a throwback to the early days of Apple computers (amongst others), where the user interface was exclusively text based. Most of the text is just harmless system status and information stuff. But the reason I do this is so I can gain access to a great open source Mac utility called Applejack. It’s the all-purpose fixerupper for Macs. In a nutshell, it’s an application that runs a series of scripts that “clean out” some of the detritus from the system. When I first started using it, I was very skeptical. But after using it a few dozen times on different flavors of Macs, I’m now a firm believer of this great utility. It just works!
My next line of defense is to boot up from a portable drive and start running my other prized utility, Disk Warrior. Although DW is not a full fledged, “swiss-army-knife” utility to fix any possible problem with a Mac – that which it does, it does exceedingly well. Well, what DOES it do exactly? DW repairs your hard drive’s disk directory, which is responsible for keeping track of what files are located where on the drive. Over time, the disk directory becomes fragmented and sometimes, corrupt. By running Disk Warrior, it checks the status of your drive and will make repairs if necessary. I have successfully used it in conjunction with Apple’s own Disk Utility.
After doing all of the above, the Mac “patient” is usually restored to full working status with a clean bill of health. I’d say that happens 99 percent of the time. What about the other 1%? Funny you should ask, because I ran headfirst into that other 1% just yesterday. Let’s just say the situation was one of those rare ones that a computer technician remembers for years and tells their grandchildren about.
Without going into too much long drawn-out (and boring) details, here is what happened. We had one iMac crashing repeatedly the last couple of days while working in Photoshop. Not just a regular crash, where you just relaunch and resume where you left off – but this crash was freezing the rest of the Mac out. Odd. Well, it got worse. It started to generate Kernel Panics. Hoo boy! Not fun when those appear. I went through the above routine and thought things were sorted out. They weren’t. The iMac decided to do an impression of a rather expensive silicon paperweight. The main drive appeared to be hosed – it was just “gone”. I just didn’t know if it was fixable or if it needed to be carted off and checked out by Apple’s own doctors.
I’m not one to give up easily so I went through my entire bag of tricks. It’s hard to say what trick did the trick, but after roughly 7 hours of computer CPR, I was able to bring the iMac back to life. There were some cross-linked files and some screwy blocks on the drive that caused the problem. For the moment, it appears that all issues were resolved during the extensive repair session. A day later, the iMac is still going ok. There are no promises it won’t return to its state of “brick-age” – that would probably mean a full drive reformat. But, for now, we’re all happy.