Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

 

Pick an apple! 
Become a TidBITS member!
 

 

TidBITS Watchlist
 
Syslogd Overwhelming Your Computer?

If your Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) system is unexpectedly sluggish, logging might be the culprit. Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/ folder), and click the CPU column twice to get it to show most to least activity. If syslogd is at the top of the list, there's a fix. Syslogd tracks informational messages produced by software and writes them to the asl.db, a file in your Unix /var/log/ directory. It's a known problem that syslogd can run amok. There's a fix: deleting the asl.db file.

Launch Terminal (from the same Utilities folder), and enter these commands exactly as written, entering your administrative password when prompted:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd

sudo rm /var/log/asl.db

sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

Your system should settle down to normal. For more information, follow the link.

Visit Discussion of syslogd problem at Smarticus

Share your own tip! | Search TipBITS

 

 

Related Articles

 

 

Other articles in the series The Macros Strike Back

 

 

Published in TidBITS 314.
Subscribe to our weekly email edition.

 

 
12 Feb 1996 | Print Printer-Friendly Version of This Article

More Word Macro Viruses

by Geoff Duncan Send Email to Author

Send Article to a Friend

More Word Macro Viruses -- According to a recent CIAC bulletin, new Microsoft Word macro viruses have been discovered, and at least two of the new varieties are damaging. (See TidBITS-312 for a related story.)

http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/g-10a.shtml

Although the worst effects are still reserved for Windows users (apparently the virus engineers aren't up-to-date on cross-platform concerns), users of Microsoft Word 6.0 or 6.0.1 on the Macintosh should be concerned. Microsoft has released new tools to combat these viruses, and many commercial anti-virus products are being updated to detect them as well.

http://www.microsoft.com/msoffice/freestuf/ msword/download/mvtool/mvtool2.htm

I haven't examined or tested Microsoft's new virus protection tools, and though Microsoft claims these tools work on a Macintosh, they're posted in a self-extracting ZIP format for DOS/Windows machines. StuffIt Expander with Expander Enhancer will decompress the file; so will Thomas Brown's popular Mac shareware utility ZipIt. As with Microsoft's earlier anti-virus tool, Microsoft's new utility only scans files opened by choosing Open from the File menu; documents which are double-clicked in the Finder or chosen from the recent documents list are not scanned. [GD]

Microsoft -- 206/635-7200 -- <wordinfo@microsoft.com>

ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/cmp/stuffit- expander-352.bin
ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/cmp/drop- stuff-with-ee-352.hqx
ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/cmp/zip-it- 135.hqx

 

Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanners — Save your business time and money
with our easy-to-use small ScanSnap Scanner line. Eliminate
paper piles by scanning documents, business cards, and receipts.
Visit us at: <http://www.ez.com/sstb>