Saturday, October 01, 2005

Software Update in Mac OS X Tiger Doesn't work if Ethernet is turned off.

Ok, found a bug today in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. I have a computer, and the only networking it uses is wireless (Airport). So it made sense to me to turn off the Bluetooth, FireWire, and Ethernet ports in the Network settings, since they weren't being used.

Once I turned off Ethernet, however, I found Software Update hangs right after launching. The Software Update progress bar display fills in about 10% and just sits there forever. As soon as I checked the Ethernet port in the Network settings it worked. I'm not using Ethernet, there is no cable connected, and it's set to DHCP right now, but for whatever reason Software Update won't work without it.

2 comments:

Jonathan said...

Seems like it's an isolated problem. I just tried it, and it works fine for me (in OS X 10.4.2).

Have you tried logging on with another account on your machine to see if it works then?

Aric said...

Yeah, it was a fresh install of Tiger, so it was 10.4.0. I'm glad to hear their fixed it in 10.4.2