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Tue, 22 Sep 2009
PortAuthority and Snow Leopard
While I haven't updated to Snow Leopard yet, I've gotten some reports of PortAuthority crashing on Snow Leopard. Sometimes these errors can be hard to debug. Here's a quick way to see what might be happening: run PortAuthority from the Terminal. Select PortAuthority in Finder, right-click on it, and select "show package contents." Navigate to Contents/MacOS and double-click on the "PortAuthority" file--this will launch PA in Terminal and print any error messages there. Copy the error messages and send them to me in an e-mail--this will help me diagnose the problem. Based on the error reports I'm seeing from users, the issue is almost always a problem with an AppleScript scripting addition: a file that has the extension "osax." These are usually installed in /Library/ScriptingAdditions. Various programs install these files to extend the Mac's built-in AppleScript scripting language with additional functionality. These files are typically 32-bit packages, which is the standard on OS X up through Leopard. Snow Leopard, however, makes most system components 64-bit, and if installed third-party libraries do not include 64-bit support, they'll cause conflicts. What's happening is that PortAuthority is crashing when it tries to use AppleScript to communicate with Growl, the nifty open-source notification system for OS X. If one of these incompatible "osax" files is installed on the system, it will cause issues with AppleScript, and hence PortAuthority. The only solution, at present, is to move the offending "osax" file out of the way, to a different folder than the /Library/ScriptingAdditions. Thus far, this has allowed PortAuthority to run without problems. By the way, the same issues may also affect my other applications. If you're seeing obscure crashes on Snow Leopard, give the above instructions a try. |
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