Apple's monster meal of updates

Stephen Withers
Friday, 16 November 2007 08:47

Business IT - Technology

A torrent of updates from Apple address the three most recent major versions of Mac OS X, consumer and pro applications, and issues with the graphics driver on certain iMacs.

Mac OS X 10.5.1 Update - a hefty 110M download for each of the server and desktop editions - arrives just three weeks after Leopard went on sale, proving correct rumours that the first update would arrive in short order. It is a broad ranging update that addresses issues in several aspects of Leopard's operation.

Security aspects include changing the description of the firewall setting "Block all incoming connections" to "Allow only essential services" to more accurately describe its purpose. The set of services permitted to receive connections when this setting is selected has been trimmed to configd (DHCP, etc), mDNSResponder (Bonjour) and racoon (IPSec). Furthermore, if a program has been specifically blocked from receiving connections, that setting will now be honoured by the firewall even if the process is running as root.

Changes to firewall settings are now applied immediately, even when they involve  processes that are already running.

Other parts of the update address a variety of issues, including one that could cause data loss when moving a file between two partitions. That bug was originally reported in the context of moving a file to a network folder, and it is not clear from Apple's description whether or not the bug has been fixed in those circumstances.

The much-publicised Time Machine backup system now works with single-partition MBR drives larger than 512G or NTFS drives of any size, and a bug in the restore capability has been fixed.