Well, two posts in a row moaning about OS X? The good thing is that this definately keeps me away from buying the Macbook just yet, the cash is no longer burning a hole in my pocket. More so it is smoldering a little and threatening to warm my coffers. :P

I found a strange problem on my Mac Mini (completely up to date, OS X Tiger 10.4.9) this morning, I fired it up to make sure my iPod had been sync’d after I’d set up a bunch of playlists to make driving and listening a bit easier. (The Alpine HU I have put in my new car is ‘iPod FullSpeed‘ enabled but the search is a complete PitA.. more on that another time..)
Having kicked off another sync, I checked my last.fm plugin had scrobbled my latest tracks and hit the “My Last.fm Profile Page” to check for any new shouts.

The Last.fm site can be a bit slow to load the page up at times, so I got myself a coffee.
When I came back, Safari was still just a blank page. not even the title had changed.
Odd, I thought, maybe my connection is out. Bounced up my XP lappy but everything was fine from there. Bizarre.
Rebooted Mac. Same problem.
Cleared all IPFW rules, even though there were no outbound blocks. No change.
Rebooted again. Nope.
Reset Safari, rebooted. No change.
At this point I decided to reboot my router via the web UI, funnily enough, I CAN view that from the Mac, so is it just remote calls being misinterpreted?
After the router came back I tested Safari again with the same result.
Fired up Unison (my NG reader du jour) and loaded in a download I had previously used. That also just hung.
Update Software times out with -1001 error.
Last thing to try (as I don’t have Firefox), I played a track in iTunes and watched to see if that could be scrobbled. Bingo, that went through ok..
(BTW, when I say Safari hung, it doesn’t EVER time out, it just sits there.)
It gets stranger…

So, my thinking is now that remote HTTP call responses are not being interpreted correctly on my Mac. Outbound ones are fine, as per the Last.fm client push to their web service.
I have also found that Safari can open RSS feeds using the feed: protocol.
The Network utility check thing returns A OK and all NSLookup, Trace, Ping and Dig are correct too.

I’ve found some similar reports of odd behaviour AFTER installing a security update but my last updates were at the start of the month, the only thing I can think of is that maybe I hadn’t rebooted after the last update. I usually leave the Mac on 24/7 (sorry hippys, eat my carbon foot print) as I access it from work over SSH but have a feeling I shut it down a couple of nights back. Maybe that’s it.

I’m currently downloading the 303MB 10.4.8 -> 10.4.9 combo update using my XP lappy (thank the heavens for IE7 :) ) and will try running that to see if I can’t blow some life into the Mini. If not, I guess it’s a reinstall of Windows I mean OS X. Shocking.

It’s still running my favourite screensaver though - The rotating wall of album art.

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