Just Hanging...

About a week ago, we had a power outage. They are fairly rare, however, when they do occur, usually my home network comes up smoothly afterwards. This time was slightly different. On my Linux workstation, I was actively working in vim when it occurred, and when it came back, on my Linux server, the files were OK, but I had issues accessing them on my workstation. Nothing a little moving files around does not solve.

The second problem, however, was with my wife's Mac. When MacOS 9 would attempt to mount her AppleTalk share on my Linux server (using netatalk), her machine would hang. There were no errors on her side and none on the server side. The only thing to stop the hang was to use the Force-Quit key combination, and even then, the machine was not stable.

So I decided to Google over it, and I quickly found a page regarding MacOS 9 Cross-Platform Issues, which mentioned the problem more in relation to Windows NT, but it offered a starting point.

After a few attempts, I decided to simply create a new directory, and painstakingly move her directories over one-by-one until I could reproduce the problem. When I was left with a handful of netatalk-specific directories. In my case, it turned out to be some data corruption in the .AppleDB directory. By using the new one that netatalk created, the problem is solved (at least for now ;-)).