OS X hangs on Spotlight

November 7, 2007 6:55 AM

My mac hangs at login, showing only the blue desktop pattern and the spotlight icon in the upper right, but no menus, no icons on the desktop.

Mac Mini, MacOS X 10.4.10. Network Home Directories. Every once in a while, someone gets a situation where the OS hangs with the spotlight icon in the upper right. This happens nearly immediately after logging into their network home. Network is switched gigabit copper.

I can boot to single-user mode, but I can't boot to 'safe mode' for some reason.
I can fully login to a local 'administrative' user with no symptoms.

a 'fsck -yf' scan produces nothing to itself to fix.

are spotlight databases stored 'per-user' or 'per computer'? What about spotlight preferences?

posted by Wild_Eep to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Databases are per-computer, prefs are per-user.
posted by kindall at 6:57 AM on November 7, 2007

Start up SSH. Log in remotely to see what's up.
posted by cmiller at 7:19 AM on November 7, 2007

Just because it's hanging at that point doesn't mean it has anything to do with Spotlight. Keep that in mind while you're troubleshooting this. It sounds more like SystemUIServer is pissed off for whatever reason.

Is there anything useful in the user's console.log file, or system.log?
posted by Mikey-San at 7:38 AM on November 7, 2007

What Mikey-San said, and do check the logs.

This has a network issue vibe to me. I know, not terribly helpful.
posted by -t at 7:46 AM on November 7, 2007

one item in /var/log/system.log looked suspicious:

Nov 7 10:29:39 MaryRs-Mini launchd: Server 0 in bootstrap 1103 uid 0: "/usr/sbin/lookupd"[62]: exited abnormally: Hangup

later tehe seerver attempts to start again... and goes down again...

Nov 7 10:29:39 MaryRs-Mini configd[37]: executing /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Kicker.bundle/Contents/Resources/enable-network
Nov 7 10:29:39 MaryRs-Mini configd[37]: posting notification com.apple.system.config.network_change
Nov 7 10:29:39 MaryRs-Mini lookupd[122]: lookupd (version 369.6) starting - Wed Nov 7 10:29:39 2007
Nov 7 10:29:40 MaryRs-Mini configd[37]: posting notification com.apple.system.config.network_change
Nov 7 10:29:40 MaryRs-Mini launchd: Server 4f07 in bootstrap 1103 uid 0: "/usr/sbin/lookupd"[122]: exited abnormally: Hangup
Nov 7 10:29:40 MaryRs-Mini lookupd[136]: lookupd (version 369.6) starting - Wed Nov 7 10:29:40 2007
Nov 7 10:29:43 MaryRs-Mini automount[168]: deferring network change notification while initialization is in progress...


checking console.log next
posted by Wild_Eep at 7:49 AM on November 7, 2007

no entries from today in the console.log, one from yesterday looks questionable.

2007-11-06 11:02:51.420 SyncServer[6743] Can't obtain lockfile to run sync server, a sync server is running on the computer mini-5.local and shares this home directory
posted by Wild_Eep at 7:57 AM on November 7, 2007

SOLVED.

I found a thread over at the macosxhints forums that suggested that the issue is font related.

It appears that one of the font caches became unreadable to some extent.

After booting the mini and logging in with a administrative user, I enabled SSH Remote Access in system prefs.

Then, I logged out, back to the 'enter your username and password' screen.

From a different computer, I ssh'ed into the Mini as the problem user. Switched to /Library/Caches/, and found the numerical directory and used 'rmdir -r ./' to prune that directory and everything under it.

I deleted the /Library/Caches/ directory, rebooted the mini. The user can now log in completely.

A quick hint.... if you don't know the numerical ID for a particular user, just do an 'ls -l', and the owner of the directory will be revealed.
posted by Wild_Eep at 8:42 AM on November 7, 2007

BTW, mikey-san was right, it was font related, not Spotlight related. (My suspicion is that it was related to the font used to draw the menu bar.)
posted by Wild_Eep at 8:44 AM on November 7, 2007

Next step, get a new keyboard for my *&^&*( iBook.
posted by Wild_Eep at 10:30 AM on November 7, 2007

turns out that I didn't delete the whole /Library/Caches/ directory, I deleted the /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/ directory.
posted by Wild_Eep at 6:12 AM on November 13, 2007