ML-2250 Printer Problems

I had some difficulties with support for my Samsung ML-2250 printer before, and with the Leopard install they seem to be back. Leopard appears to detect the printer automatically, but on startup and whenever I try to print, the printer just spits out sheets with random bits of PostScript on them.

This looks to be the core of the problem: the printer driver describes itself as "Samsung ML-2250 Series PS", but according to the printer manual PostScript is an optional extra that I don't have.

So maybe I need to revisit the helpful comment I got about Foomatic…

Finder hang

After rebooting with the latest software update, the Finder hang that I had before is back.

I'm trying out a hint from this thread, which is to rename the /Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks. Given that it's an intermittent fault, if I don't mention the hang again that will probably mean that it worked…

c++filt, aka cxxfilt

Aha. Via the list of Leopard open source stuff I found a download for the relevant patched version of binutils to produce cxxfilt (a.k.a. c++filt), so that particular project directory is back in business.

GraphicConverter 6.0.1

Easy solution to the GraphicConverter problem: upgrade to the latest version and buy an upgrade license. It's only $20 for an upgrade (from the bundled Mac OS X version), which is cheap given the current USD/GBP rate.

Filesharing fixed

Looking at the logs in the Console application, there seem to be a lot of errors of the form:

tdb(unnamed): tdb_open_ex: spinlocks no longer supported

If I get rid of /private/var/db/samba/secrets.tdb, then there are more errors complaining about different .tdb files in the /private/var/samba/ directory. So I tried getting rid of the whole /private/var/samba/ directory (after having saved off a copy, of course), and I can suddenly see the Mac from the Windows machine again.

Of course, this BFMI approach isn't really a solution to be recommended: I've got no idea what the files were there for and whether this has just made my Samba connections dreadfully insecure.

Filesharing problems

I discovered that the Mac box is no longer visible from the PC, so it looks like I've got some Samba problems under Leopard. Looking at the logs in the Console app, it looks like smbd keeps exiting immediately after startup. Running from the command line also fails:

/etc:smbd -i -S
smbd version 3.0.25b-apple started.
Copyright Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team 1992-2007
WARNING: The "printer admin" option is deprecated
Failed to open /private/var/db/samba/secrets.tdb
ERROR: we did not create the shmem (owned by another user, uid 0, gid 0)
ERROR: failed to setup profiling

No clue on this one—the only hint out there looks to be unrelated (shutting down Apache makes no difference).

Apache setup

My pre-Leopard setup for Apache had a number of tweaks, but they have all stopped working with the upgrade.

The configuration file seems to have moved to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, and now Includes various *.conf files from the extra/ and other/ directories.

So I just created a other/dmd.conf file with the configuration that I'd previously added to httpd.conf, forced a refresh with sudo killall -HUP httpd and things were working again.

I also found that my user web directory (the stuff under ~/Sites) was no longer visible—browsers would get a 403 Access Denied. Following a couple of useful hints, I added a users/dmd.conf file and all was well:

<Directory "/Users/dmd/Sites/">
  Options Indexes MultiViews
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>