Thursday 24 May 2012

MacBook Pro with dull screen (no back light)

Just looking at a MacBook Pro 17" which, when booted up, seems to display a very dull image. I can only assume that the back light was not on. On rebooting the backlight turned on again. On switching it off and back on again, the backlight appeared to be on, but when it got to the login screen turned off again.

I assumed it was down to the sensor which detects how much ambient light there is, and turns brightness up or down accordingly. I decided it was probably best if it did not use this sensor. I went into system preferences and display and un-ticked the use sensor box.

Seems to have resolved the problem.

Thursday 17 May 2012

Safari Crashing on OS X 10.6.8 for Active Directory Users

It appears on the machines where they were 'accidentally' updated to OS X 10.6.8 (we currently run OS X 10.6.6), Active Directory users cannot run Safari as it crashes on launch. For local users Safari works fine. I have deleted the ~/Library/Safari/ folder and also the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.safari* files.

My initial conclusion is that Safari doesn't like the permissions on certain folders in the ~/Library folder. e.g. Caches folder. I am used to this issue hence the installation of the useful program "NHR" (Network Home Redirection"), which currently redirects the ~/Library/Caches folder to a local location. I shall look into pinning down which folder needs redirecting. I have found this post which suggests ~/Library/Safari/WebpageIcons.db causes crashes. I shall continue to add to this post.

Tuesday 1 May 2012

Linking an inventory Access Database to a booking database

So I want to link the existing database we have for our inventory, to a nice little database I've found for booking the equipment in and out.

The reason I would like to 'link' to it, is because a lot of people are using the existing database and only a few will be taking advantage of the new booking system. But I'm still not sure..

Anyway, found this microsoft help page to link databases