Apple 10.6.3 Snow Leopard Update Trouble
Upon trying to upgrade to the newest major update by Apple for OS X to 10.6.3 I had nothing but trouble. Some Macs upgrade fine. Others do not.
I always download the full combo update since I have hundreds of Macs to update it saves lots of time and bandwidth to just download the full update one time instead of a smaller update over and over again. The combo update for the client is 713 MB.
When running it on my favorite iMac 24 which I use as my main workstation the GUI installer would fail within the first minute of the install during the “writing files” stage and had some useless error saying the installer had failed and that I needed to contact the software manufacturer (in this case Apple). I tried all sorts of things and scoured the Internet as well as Apple’s site looking for help but since the update is so new there is very little info out there. Hopefully this will help you if you’re having the same trouble!
Yet Another System Utility
I cleaned temp files and dumped cache folders and tried multiple accounts and ran cleanup utilities including YASU (http://jimmitchell.org/yasu/) which all helped the system but didn’t do anything for the update. I even ran the software updater from the command line using “sudo softwareupdate -i -a” but all failed.
After about an hour of searching I found that if I didn’t close the installer after the error I could go to the menu bar and view the log file. Silly me I knew it was there! The log file told me that there was an error 23, too many open files in system. There is very little info on this error 23 except that it is indeed too many open files in the system. So after some more investigation I found the sysctl command. By using sysctl kern.maxfiles you can see what your system is set at as far as the maximum allowed open files. My iMac was at 2000 which seemed like more than enough but this was largest update I had attempted and I have LOTS of software on my iMac. So I changed that value to 5000 using the command “sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=5000″. Understand this is done either under sudo or sudo su in a terminal window.
After changing the maxfiles to 5000 the updater ran without a hitch! I’m not sure if I need to set that value back to 2000 but I’m going to leave it at 5000 since there should be plenty of system resources to handle it. If I start to see system performance issues I will set it back to 2000. I know most Linux systems are well under 1000 and some under 500 for max files so 5000 seems like overkill.
Please leave a comment if this fixed your issue or contact me if you need additional help!!
Popularity: 100% [?]
You, Sir, are a verifiable GENIUS!!!
On my brand new iMac the update completely froze the system on reboot.
Apple hotline unreachable the whole day.
maxfiles were already at 12000, but increasing them to 25000 made it run again!
Excellent advice!!!!
many thanks!
and two thumbs down for apple.
Glad it worked for you!
Apple Second LEvel Support could not help…Said they have to ask for developers…
Have to wait approx. a week for a solution…
—> WORKED FINE, CHRIS!
—> Update to 10.6.3 successfull.
Greetings from Oldenburg, Germany
I’ve been asked for specific instructions for those not familiar with using terminal.
1. Open Terminal (under Applications, Utilities)
2. Type “sudo su” (without quotes)
3. Type your password (you must have admin account)
4. Type “sysctl kern.maxfiles” (this will show you the max open files allowed currently)
5. Type “sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=####” replacing #### with a number much larger than your current maxfiles setting. For example, if your maxfiles is currently 12000 change it to 24000 or maybe 30000.
A reboot is not necessary. After making the maxfiles change rerun the update.
That’s it!
Thank you,
worked like a charm.
Greetings from Sindelfingen, Germany
Very nicely done……! Thank you sooo much…
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I had tried at least 15 other suggestions before finding your quick and easy fix for this mess.
I’ll be sharing this with my colleagues in my school district’s IT department in anticipation of lots of the same error messages!
Wow, I can not thank you enough! Apple was no help at all! I have searched for 2 days and finally came across your site. It literally took a minute to resolve the issue that no one else could help me with! YOU ROCK!
Just wanted to let you know that I had to do this again for the 10.6.4 update. Either the maxfiles change isn’t permanent, or the 10.6.3 update reset it back to 2000…but knowing that this was almost assuredly the cause of my hang, I bumped it back up to 5000 and it installed with no issues at all.
Thanks again,
Dominic