Leopard brought a number of improvements to Spotlight, the OS X search mechanism, including system-wide integration with the Finder and native applications. This is accomplished with an indexing process, mdworker, that runs in the background at all times organizing file metadata. While this feature has proven to be quite powerful, it’s also proved quite troublesome, as issues that would previously effect only Spotlight can now disable the ability to search the content of email messages and calendars as well.

When Spotlight attempts to scan a corrupt file, it can stall or crash, failing to properly index your disks and (as a result) disabling the search functionality in other Apple applications. To figure out what Spotlight’s choking on, you’ll first need it to stop indexing entirely. Make sure you’ve quit out of all your effected applications, then open the Terminal and type:

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/*

Once the Spotlight process is disabled, remove the old index files Spotlight built of your existing file system, replacing DISKNAME for the name of each mounted volume:

sudo rm -r /Volumes/DISKNAME/.Spotlight-V100

Next, open the Console application in the Utilities folder. View “All Messages” in the left hand column, and use the “Filter” field in the top right to search for “mdworker” (the behind-the-scenes process that indexes data for Spotlight). If the remaining errors end in file names, you’ve found a likely source for your Spotlight woes.

Make sure these corrupt files are safe to move (and not within Application bundles or required by the OS), then relocate them to a removable drive or erase them entirely. With your suspect files out of the way, you can restart Spotlight indexing:

sudo mdutil -E -i on /Volumes/*

Once the indexing is complete, check the Console logs again to make sure the errors haven’t repeated. You can now reopen your applications, and the ability to search messages and appointments should be restored.

The issue wasn’t reported in the Retrospect Knowledge Base or even the Retrospect Twitter Feed, nor was it emailed to registered Retrospect 8 users. If you happened to be lurking on Retrospect’s support forums, however, you’d find their handy Alert for Tape Library Users posted April 3rd.

According to the notice, “When highlighting a group of tape slots or a magazine and clicking Erase, EMC Retrospect 8.0 incorrectly sends the Erase All command, commanding the tape library to erase all the tapes contained in the library, instead of only those tapes in the group/magazine”. They suggest that instead, you erase each tape individually, or remove any tapes you don’t want erased from your loader.

So if you’re thinking about upgrading to Retrospect 8, you might want to wait until this (and a host of less catastrophic issues) have been resolved.

Update: This issue was addressed in Retrospect 8.0.608. We’d recommend you update immediately to use Retrospect 8 safely.

Licensing for this product has stopped working.
You cannot use the product at this time.

There’s a variety of reasons that the CS4 licensing components might give up the ghost, including low system resources, a damaged licensing sub-system, or corruption of the licensing data itself. The message goes on to suggest reinstalling the component in question, but it’s a solution that seldom, if ever, succeeds. Instead, find the error code that the bottom of the window, and take a look at this handy, exhaustive, and embarrassing entry in Adobe’s own Knowledge Base: Error “Licensing for this product has stopped working” when you launch Adobe Creative Suite 4 products.

In that article (far too lengthy to even summarize), Adobe helpfully explains the nine different ways your legally purchased and properly installed Creative Suite products might have licensing failures, and the variety of ways it can be addressed on a machine-by-machine basis. One of these procedures will undoubtedly fix your individual CS4 installation, if not the much larger issue that even corporate editions of Adobe’s flagship product can be hobbled by an overly zealous, overly complicated DRM system.

Special Thanks: My intrepid colleague Jasson Lewellen discovered many of these issues firsthand, as well as a number of their solutions, and pointed me at Adobe’s Knowledge Base documentation of them for this article.

If you’re in charge of your Macintosh network, have locked down administrative rights on your machines and managed client preferences through Open Directory, these automatic update notices may not be a concern. If, on the other hand, you’re not supposed to touch anyone’s precious machine until suddenly it’s broken, the ability to simply turn off automatic update notification could mean happier much users and a lot less stress for you.

The bad news is that every software vendor seems to have a different mechanism to store their update preferences. The good news is that you should be able to adapt the examples below to almost any application. These commands can be pushed out to every machine on your network via Apple Remote Desktop, or rolled into a complete shell script for deployment with tools like JAMF Casper Suite and LANrev.

Disable Apple Software Update:

The simplest update notification to turn off is Apple’s own Software Update. It’s also the most important. While problems with a third-party update might destabilize a single product, problems with Apple updates could cause issues with any or all your applications. Fortunately, the Software Update system preference is just the front-end to the softwareupdate command. As such, you can disable your own update notifications for Apple products in the Terminal by typing:

softwareupdate --schedule off

For whatever reason, though, this setting isn’t followed system-wide. Instead, it’s a user-level preference, meaning that turning off updates as the administrator doesn’t disable them for other accounts. Instead, we’re forced to write a more complex script to run the command as each user individually:

for USER in `ls -1 /Users | \
sed -e '/Shared/d' -e '/Deleted Users/d' -e '/.localized/d'`; \
do; \
sudo -u $USER softwareupdate --schedule off; \
done

The first line uses the ls command to get a list of all the directories in /Users. The second uses sed to remove the standard non-user directories from that list. The final line uses sudo to let you run the softwareupdate command masquerading as all the other users on a machine.

Disable Microsoft Office 2008 AutoUpdate:

Although Microsoft has a reputation for creating its own standards, Office 2008 follows Apple’s .plist format to store it’s preferences. For this reason, we can use the defaults command to change the Office AutoUpdate settings:

defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate2 HowToCheck -string "Manual"

In the event that the AutoUpdate preferences are set to “Automatic”, this command will change the setting to “Manual” in the com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist file for that user. We can use the same loop we created above for this command as well, disabling automatic checking like so:

for USER in `ls -1 /Users | \
sed -e '/Shared/d' -e '/Deleted Users/d' -e '/.localized/d'`; \
do; \
sudo -u $USER defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate2 \
HowToCheck -string "Manual"; \
done

Because we’re just writing to a .plist, this technique can be the basis for adjusting any application that uses Apple’s preference file format.

Disable Adobe CS4 Updater:

Adobe, on the other hand, doesn’t follow anyone’s rules. Although their Updater preferences are stored in an XML file, it isn’t one any standard Apple commands can read. Instead, you can treat it like any other text file, finding the string that contains the update settings and substitute another string for it in place with sed:

sed -i "" 's:<AutoCheck>1</AutoCheck>:<AutoCheck>0</AutoCheck>:' \
~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Updater5/AdobeUpdaterPrefs.dat

In this case, we’re just searching for the “AutoCheck” tag in the AdobeUpdaterPrefs file, and changing the value of 1 (enabled) to a value of 0 for this user. Just like the other settings above, we can change this for all users on a machine with a similar “for” loop:

for USER in `ls -1 /Users | \
sed -e '/Shared/d' -e '/Deleted Users/d' -e '/.localized/d'`; \
do; \
sed -i "" 's:<AutoCheck>1</AutoCheck>:<AutoCheck>0</AutoCheck>:' \
Users/$USER/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/\
Updater5/AdobeUpdaterPrefs.dat; \
done

With these tools you can not only disable software updates for the major Mac applications, but with a little work you can use them to change a wide range of settings across the Macintosh platform.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Since laziness is a virtue when it comes to systems administration, we’ve packaged these commands (plus ones for CS3 and Office 2004) into one easy script on our new Downloads page. Please grab a copy, and make us feel all important.

Suddenly, stable installations of Suitcase Fusion wouldn’t launch at all, with no obvious error or explanation as to why. The answer lies inexplicably in Extensis’ handling of a computer’s Bonjour name, the publicly-seen machine name set in the “Sharing” pane of OS X’s System Preferences. If a Bonjour name exceeds 20 characters, or features non-alphanumeric characters, Suitcase Fusion is apparently too distracted to let your users get their work done. Extensis hasn’t provided any public information on why computer names might be an obstacle to font management.

Unless you feel like renaming all your workstations, the sane response is to hold back the 10.5.6 update until Extensis addresses the issue with a Suitcase update or Apple changes something back in 10.5.7. When the situation changes, we’ll update this article with more information.

Update: About a month after 10.5.6 shipped, Extensis followed with Suitcase Fusion 13.0.2, released specifically to solve this issue.

And they were right. Sort of. The update fixed a long-standing, cross-platform, critical bug that allowed malicious Excel files to execute code on a victim’s machine.

Unfortunately, it also prevented Office 2008 users with both POP and Exchange email accounts from updating, or responding to, shared meeting invitations. This may not be a common configuration among stand-alone Office for Mac users, but it’s the most common setup for Macintosh users in corporate settings.

The good news is, the problem was fixed just two weeks later. The bad news is that because the update isn’t considered “critical”, many Office for Mac users still can’t participate in the scheduling of meetings, appointments, and holiday parties. If you haven’t run the Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.4 Update, it’s worth doing so immediately.

Uninstalling Adobe CS2:

The only way to completely remove Creative Suite 2 from a system is do so manually, using the list of CS2 files posted at Adobe’s own support site. Unless you specifically need CS2 for legacy work, it’s best to remove it completely before installing CS3 or CS4, as having multiple versions can corrupt preference files and make the applications behave erratically.

Uninstalling Adobe CS3:

Loading CS3, on the other hand, isn’t always as easy as following a checklist. The installer can become convinced that some or all of the suite is already present, even when there isn’t any usable software available. For this very reason, Adobe has a script to uninstall the Photoshop CS3 beta, the non-bundled versions of Acrobat 8, or even just a previous CS3 install that somehow went wrong.

CS3Clean, once double-clicked, runs in the Terminal to remove every application, file, preference, and driver that might be preventing a fresh installation. The script offers two official “levels” of cleaning, the first removing everything *but* Acrobat 8, the second removing all CS3-associated files, plus a mysterious third option which isn’t listed (or explained) but is often recommended by Adobe’s phone support representatives, and a secret fourth which removes *all* Adobe and Macromedia software.

The script also uninstalls CS3 in about 10% of the time the programs actually take to install initially. That means that rather than installing CS3 individually on the machines that require it, you can often save time by including Creative Suite in company-wide disk images, then removing it on the workstations where it isn’t needed.

Uninstalling Adobe CS4:

With the launch of CS4 this week, Adobe released the Creative Suite Cleanup application, a graphical tool to remove all traces of Creative Suite 3 or 4. Use the pull-down menu to select your version of Creative Suite, then highlight the components you want uninstalled at hit the “Cleanup” button. If you’re prompted to try uninstalling the product instead, click the “Cleanup” button again to remove all your Creative Suite components by brute force.

With these tools you can eliminate any recent version of Creative Suite, allowing you to install the newest version (or just reinstall your existing software) trouble-free.

Recommended Reading: If you’re considering a full uninstall procedure to merely address a licensing issue, check out how to reserialize Creative Suite instead at the CreativeTechs QuickTips blog.

It’s hard to tell who to blame for this disaster, if blame is important to you. The fact that saving documents to the server worked just fine in 10.5.2 (and that multiple sources have reported that the functionality returns in 10.5.4) makes Apple look like the bad guy. On the other hand, Adobe has very publicly resisted modernizing portions of its underlying application code, and their antiquated position of not officially supporting direct server usage is bewildering to anyone computing in the 21st century.

The obvious solution is to avoid installing 10.5.3 at all (or roll back to 10.5.2 if you’ve kept a Time Machine backup of your system volume) until the problem is solved. The immediate (and far-less obvious answer) is to always use the “Save As” option, which continues to work perfectly on servers of all types.

Update: On June 30th, Apple released their 10.5.4 update. Among it’s improvements, they list “Resolves an issue with saving and reopening Adobe Creative Suite 3 files on a remote server”.

Recommended Reading: The normally-reasonable John Nack (Senior Product Manager, Adobe Photoshop) first reported issues saving CS3 files to 10.5.3 servers in his otherwise entertaining blog. For those with strong stomachs, some very angry commentary can be found on Apple’s own discussion boards.

There’s a known issue in Acrobat 8 where corrupt or improperly-permissioned support files can cause the application to quit without warning. The problem centers around Adobe’s Updater plugin, which by default checks for software patches when Acrobat first starts and causes the program to crash. Armed with this knowledge, it’s easy to choose a solution appropriate for your environment.

The simplest method of dealing with this is to disable the plugin by selecting Acrobat in the Finder, choosing “Get Info” from the “File” menu, and unchecking the “Updater.acroplugin” box in the “Plugins” section of the Info pane. This method will prevent Acrobat from quitting unexpectedly, and is simple enough to walk users through over the phone or email. Unfortunately, it doesn’t address the underlying issue.

The next approach is to replace the Updater plugin entirely. Adobe offers a fix for the Updater Plugin [963 KB]. To install the new plugin, right-click Acrobat 8 and choose “Show Package Contents”, then open the “Contents” folder and place the new file in the “Plugins” directory. Though the publisher notes this doesn’t work in every case, it allows Acrobat to run properly in most environments with the auto-update mechanism.

Finally, in most large environments, the best solution is to remove the offending plugin entirely. To do this, once again right-click Acrobat 8 and choose “Show Package Contents”, this time going into the Plugins folder and removing the file named “Updater.acroplugin”. This not only returns Acrobat 8 to full functionality, but prevents future issues that might be caused by unscheduled or user-initiated updates.

Recommended Reading: If you’re looking for greater control of the update process, Adobe offers patches for manual download, testing, and installation at its Acrobat for Macintosh support page. If you’re looking for more information on this issue, take a look at the Adobe Product Forums or the Acrobat for Macintosh list at Google Groups.

In the Utilities folder you’ll find the often-overlooked Keychain Access. Open it, and scroll down the main window to find the password item you need. If a user has multiple keychains, you may have to search more than one, but you can skip those named “System” and “System Roots” in Leopard (as well as “X509Anchors” and “X509Certificate” in Tiger). Select “Get Info” from the file menu to see the entry details, then click on the “Show password” button and enter the owner’s main keychain password.

If your users can’t rescue an essential password from their memories, this approach can retrieve it from the OS X Keychain instead.

Recommended Reading: Giles Turnbull has an extensive overview of Keychain Access available at the extensive O’Reilly MacDevCenter.