Web Forge Development

Note: This article is a bit long as it follows my entire troubleshooting process. If you want you can skip right down to the resolution.

I recently encountered an issue with a friend’s Intel iMac. He’s running Mac OS X 10.4.11 and trying to install Safari 4.0. The disk image downloads just fine, and decompresses, but the .pkg file enclosed will not open. The icon is a blank file icon, not the typical .pkg icon one would normally see.

He brought the computer into work so I could take a look at it. The Installer application (/Applications/Utilities/Installer.app on 10.4) is sporting the default document icon, not a fancy Apple-esque hard drive icon. When I try to launch Installer manually, it bounces once in the dock and disappears. Odd…

So I fired up the Console to take a look at error output. Watching the console log, I see the following error listed 1 time, each time I try to launch the application:

2009-11-05 09:05:47.002 Installer [245] Unable to load nib file: PagedInstaller, exiting

Well thats not good! I did some Googling and found a number of smattered articles dealing with the same issue, but with various other installer packages. So I had a pretty strong feeling the problem was not with the Safari 4.0 installer package.

Most of these other sites recommended an archive and reinstall. I believed there was a better solution.

Apple’s Support site was a dead end. Their search function leaves a lot to be desired.

As I looked at the various other results regarding this issue, one theme was prevalent: everyone encountering this issue was running 10.4.11. So, my first inclination was a problem with the 10.4.11 update itself. Perhaps a permissions issue when applying the update through Software Update? So, I did a permissions repair and redownloaded the 10.4.11 update which is, of course, a .pkg file.

So I had to come up with a way to install package files without the Installer.app package installer. Luckily, most everything that can be done in OS X can also be done with a Unix application inside Terminal. So, I downloaded the update (link), fired up my Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and entered the following:
% sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ 10.4.11\ Combined\ Update\ \(Intel\)/MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.11Intel.pkg -target /
Let’s take a quick look at this command.
sudo: This invokes the application with administrator-level privileges.
installer: This is basically a text version of the Installer app.
-pkg: This tells installer that the target is a package.
/Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ 10.4.11\ Combined\ Update/MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.11Intel.pkg: This is the path to the installer file. If the download mounted a disk image, this should be correct. If not, modify as necessary.
-target /: This says to use the file system mounted on / as the installation location. That’s our hard drive!

After installing and rebooting the machine, I still could not access the Installer application. So my next thought was to try to get a fresh copy of the Installer application from the package. I downloaded Pacifist from http://www.charlessoft.com and remounted the Combo Update disk image. Inside Pacifist, I clicked “Open Package File” and selected the .pkg. This brings up a listing of all the files in the combo update. I extracted the Installer application, but it still would not run.

So I did some snooping around online, and found that these .nib files contain xml configuration files that specify text, color, images, etc. for windows and menus. I found the path for the PagedInstaller.nib file should be /Applications/Utilities/Installer.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/PagedInstaller.nib. I went to another machine that I have here at the office that runs 10.4.11 (its actually a PPC 10.4.11 server), and the directories are all present on that machine. So, I think what happened is, somewhere along the line a software update overwrote the Installer.app directory, instead of updating files inside of it. Whoops! The Intel macs preinstalled with 10.4 were relatively few, as 10.5 came out soonafter the switch to Intel. Apple could easily fix this by updating the 10.4.11 Combo Updater to include the ENTIRE Installer.app directory *hint hint Apple*.

So now I have a dilemma. I have an incomplete Installer.app directory, and no Intel machine with the appropriate files to fix the situation.

However, I do have the reinstall DVD!

Resolution

So I insert the reinstall DVD, open the folder, then open the Applications/Utilities folder on the disc, and lo and behold I found a working copy of Installer!

I copied this app over to the /Applications/Utilities directory and it works like a charm. I then reapplied the 10.4.11 Combo Update simply by double clicking the .pkg file. Oh the little things we take for granted!!! So now Instlaller is working, and patched up to date.

I was downloading a large video file recently, and I didn’t want it to completely saturate our bandwidth at work, my boss frowns upon this.

Since our connection maxes out at about 160KB/s, I wanted to throttle my download bandwidth to 100KB/s. Here’s how you can accomplish this using ipfw.

1) Open Applications/Utilities/Terminal.
2) At the prompt, type:sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 100KByte/s
That will create a new “pipe” with a 100KB/s maximum throughput.
3) Type:sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80
That will assign the pipe to all traffic on port 80. You can substitute whatever port you are using.

That's it! Your bandwidth on port 80 (including your download) will be throttled down to 100KBs. You can even do this during an existing download and it shouldn't break anything.

To delete the pipe:sudo ipfw delete 1
That will get you back to full speed. Or, you can just reboot your computer.

Note: tested on Mac OS X 10.5.8, but this should work on all versions of Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 (at least).