shutdown problems, advice needed

[Gnomo]

Warning this is kinda a long story.

I work part time for my College's IT department and am considered the most knowledgable technician when it comes to the macintosh platform (scary considering I've only had a mac for the last year ).

Currently the college is in the midst of a conversion from a Novell environment to Win 2k environment. Part of this conversion is switching all users from Groupwise to Exchange/Outlook.

The powers that be, have decided that in order to limit the amout of software the Help Desk has to troubleshoot, they are only going to allow connections to the faculty and staff exchange server using the exchange protocol or the Outlook WebAccess interface (so IMAP is out of the question) ::evil::
BTW: anyone know when "summer 2003" officially is?? Cause the next version of Entourage would make my job a ton easier.

Anyway, on one of my days off, one of out Music faculty brought his powerbook in to the help desk to have his email account converted. At this time one of our less knowledgable technicians decided that the best way for this Prof to access his email would be to use Outlook for OS 9 (the Prof is running 10.2.6), however after installing it, the powerbook began having problems shutting down (I don't know why this prof wants to shutdown his powerbook every night and mine is not to question why, so please don't advise me to tell him to "leave it on", I've done this to no avail), so this same technican determined (I don't know how) that Outlook was the problem and uninstalled it and told the prof to use the webaccess and sent him on his way.

The next day when I returned I was given the task of finding a way to fix this problem because it was still having problems shutting down. Here are the symptoms:

The powerbook is connected to our wireless network. When a command is issued to the apple menu (ie shutdown, sleep, about this mac, etc) it ignores it. Similarly the powerbutton does not respond with the appropriate dialog. I have even tried the combo + eject that is the same as the power button (can't remember the keystroke, but I looked it up at the time) and that didn't work.
The only way to get the powerbook to power off was to remove the battery and wait for the capactor to run out.
However, when the Prof takes the computer home (where there isn't a wireless network) he is able to get the computer to shutdown just fine.

I have tried turning off the airport card when it is experiencing this problem, but that does not produce any different results. I also tried to run fsck from the command line when it was having problems, but it did not execute the program.

Anyway when the computer reboots and runs fsck then the computer will behave as long as it is in front of me, so I gave it back thinking it works. The next day it is back...same problem.

I have run the software that came with apple care and found no problems. I did repair permissions and fixed a good deal of problems...got it working...gave it back...next day, it is back with the same problem.

I have tried putting the powerbook into target disc mode and connecting it to another mac, but when I did that I got an error message about not being able to read any volumes.

So, my question to this fine group of experts is: Any ideas as to how to fix this? short of reinstalling the OS?
If not, any ideas as to how to fix the unreadable volumes problem so that I can get the users home directory off the machine before I nuke it?

 

[Gnomo]

Ah~! I went into work today and apparently this problem is spreading.
Now one of our PR staff (the only one in the department using a Mac) is experiencing the same problem as our Music Faculty.

The newly effected computer is a gray powermac g4 running 10.2.6 and OS 9 (because we haven't upgraded to things like Photoshop 7, but we probably will when the we get the new budget). The powermac is plugged into the wired portion of the network and does not have a wireless card, nor did it ever have Outlook for OS9 installed (which was originally believed to be the source of the problem).

Using the process of elimination, the only things that I can think of that is the same between these two systems is the fact that they are using Outlook Webaccess to check their email and they are running 10.2.6.

I doubt is a OS X problem, because I'm running X.2.6 on my iBook and have no problems. I have my doubts that it could be related to the Webaccess system ... it seems to be the only viable option (considering they are the only Macs that access it and the only Mac experiencing problems) however, it runs in a web browser, so I really doubt that it could be responsible for this kind of problem.

Any ideas, shots in the dark? ...Heck at this point I'd even take snide remarks.

 

[symphonix]

Obviously *some* software is running that is disrupting the systems somehow. I'd start by getting a full listing of running processes on both machines.

Open a Terminal and type "ps aux" then check the running processes. You could probably eliminate anything that runs on only one of the machines, and then start systematically discounting other products one at a time. Whatever you have left over, and there will be a fair few you can't explain, post them here.

Next, I'd open the Console (in Applications/Utilties) and set it to automatically come up in the event of a program crash. You never know, it might pop up with an error that might help.

Look for any crash logs in /Library/Logs and /var/log/, especially the system.log file. This might take a bit of hunting.

Finally, zap the PRAM. Sometimes a power problem is caused by a firmware error.

Lets try and work through this one on a process of deduction, starting by killing particular programs one at a time and checking for the error, and working backward from there.

 

[lydell]

Hello all. I too have a mac that ignores the commands to shutdown, restart, or logout. I havn't figured out the culprit yet, but I read in mac addict just today that this problem often occurs due to usb peripherals that are misbehaving or need new drivers installed. I have a work around for the whole mess that works. The only trouble I see is when new software requires a restart, I'll explain in a sec. To shutdown a stubborn computer, open the Terminal application. If you are not logged in as an admin user, you must log the admin user into the terminal. To do this, type "login" then enter the name and password for the admin acct. If you are the admin or only have one user on your computer, you don't have to log into the terminal. To shutdown your computer, type "sudo shutdown -h now" This will shut your computer off I hope (it works for my computer at least). To restart your computer using terminal, type "reboot -l now." The only concern I have is in situations where the computer requires that you restart to finish the installation of a program. I don't know that these commands are appropriate in these situations, but they seem to be working fine for my mac. There is something satisfying about getting the computer to turn itself ooff rather than holding the power button everytime to want to turn it off. I just wish that I could figure out how to solve the problem. Archiving and installing the OS passed the problem onto the next system, so don't try this to solve the issue.