Guylhem's most recent funny hacks & thoughts

MacOSX : Stuck in a grey screen with circling cursor after some remote changes

Never happened before, so this this warranted further investigations!

First I went into single user mode, where I saw notices of mDNSresponder that could not be spawned.

Figured out I tried to change some perms on the user interface, to increase security on my mother computer, and thus created a strange bug. A google search on mDNSresponder pointed me to: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/184944-os-hangs-blue-screen-just-before-login.html#post1055281 :

“it was caused by sharing the boot volume via Server Admin and then removing read access for ‘everyone’ (within Server Admin). In my opinion this is a serious bug - Server Admin settings should never be able to inhibit booting - preferably file sharing controlled by Server Admin should be totally independent of any local conventional OS X file sharing, or is this too much to expect?”

Solution : single user boot or CD rescue booth, then as explained in the post :

ls -ld /

(followed by the return key) ; Correct permissions are: drwxrwxr-t and the eighth character is critical. If it is not an r you can correct it as follows, so type:

/sbin/mount -uw /

(followed by the return key) ; then type:

chmod 1775 /

(followed by the return key) ; then type:

exit ; reboot

Thanks google, you save my day here !