News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 19, 2007

troubleshooting

Updating prebinding is dangerous

Posted Mar. 19, ’07, 7:43 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Troubleshooting

Unsanity Unsanity has become a fountain of useful troubleshooting information lately. When you’re installing an update from Apple, do not launch any applications. In fact, just to be safe, I’ll do you one better, don’t do anything while the update is running. I’ll admit, I’m one of the worst offenders when it comes to this. I’ve always kept doing stuff while the update ran.

Today, I change my policy. At the “Optimize” stage of the install, update_prebinding is run. That in itself isn’t bad. However, there’s a huge bug in it. If another application launches that doesn’t have its prebinding up to date, it will try to do so and this is when things go horribly wrong. If multiple processes try to update prebinding, the libraries being bound could be erased, resulting in a completely unbootable system. At that point, you’ll have to roll back to that backup that you’ve been religiously doing since we keep telling you here.

Alternatively, you can start the system in verbose mode (command-v) and check to see what’s missing. Then you try to get a pristine copy from another machine running the same version of OS X with the same architecture (PowerPC or Intel). Then again, an ounce of prevention is definitely worth it in this instance. (As an aside for Macaroni users, I’d seriously recommend disabling it when you do updates so it doesn’t run update_prebinding at the same time either.)


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