What happens when something goes wrong on the Mac? Take a deep breath and don't panic. Troubleshooting is troubleshooting regardless of platform. Here are the most common issues, installation issues, networking issues, crashes, and some tips on what to do to resolve them.

What happened to Notes.INI?
One of the biggest differences between Notes on Mac OS X and Windows, is the Notes.INI file. It does not exist on the Mac.

A file that does the same thing is called the Notes Preferences. As seen in Figure A, it can be found in the user's home directory > Library > Preferences.

FIGURE A


This file can be edited by double clicking it. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Some important installation tips
When experiencing installation issues, the first thing to do is examine the error message. They are mostly straight forward and can help identify the issue. Here are a few other tips that can help:

• There is a known issue with FileVault. Please disable this feature before installing. Then you can re-enable it when the install is completed.

• Make sure the destination directory does not contain any unsupported characters. The specified directory location cannot contain any of the following characters: !"';\#%|=?/.

• The user installing the application should have proper permissions to the install directory. Mac OS X employs a Unix-style permission system for every file, and directory. The installer needs read, write and execute permission.

The terminal
Remember that the Mac OS X operating system is a variant of Unix, and is very similar to Linux. The most recent version of Mac OS X, Leopard, is actually considered Unix (rather than Unix-like) and is certified UNIX 03 for Intel processors.

Since Mac OS X is Unix, there's a nice terminal interface as well as all the pretty icons. The terminal is where you can enter commands. Some common commands used are ls (list directory), kill (a process), finger (status info), ftp (file transfer), telnet (virtual terminal), and netstat (network status).

An example of a telnet command from the terminal is in the form: telnet <IP address> <port #>. This would be used when trying to determine if a client can connect from the Mac over port 1352, to a Domino server, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B


The terminal program is found in the utilities folder. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The Network Utility is your friend
For networking troubleshooting, you can employ the Network Utility, shown in Figure C, that is included on the Mac. The Network Utility packages common network commands into a single user friendly tool. This located in the utilities directory.