Firewire issues resolved in Panther?


Abstract: The IEEE 1394/1394b (Firewire) spec is an IEEE ratified peripheral specification that should work if followed. If devices follow the specification there should be communication and no loss of data on a firewire bus. According to many reports, this didn't happen with the first release of Panther. Now existing devices that were fine with Jaguar need firmware revisions to work with Panther and lots of people lost data, why?

According to Apple, their release of the 10.3.1 patch to Panther has fixed a lot of the problems with FW drives with Panther. But, a lot of devices will need firmware updates (see link.) It's great that this information is out there and that there are fixes. Panther is a great operating system with a number of nice enhancements to both the user interface and to the directory services capability of the OS. But, deploying the firmware fixes to an unknown number of firewire devices across an institution as large as a big university is going to complicate deployment.
As a personal interest, it would be interesting to see a post mortem analysis of this issue. I'd be interested to find out if the problem is with the 1394 spec or if folks deviated from it? I assume that such post mortem analysis is done on issues like this (and the first 10.2.8 upgrade that rendered patched system unable to communicate on 10BT LANS?)
For us, though, it is nice to know there is an OS patch in place and that 10.3.1 will address some of the issues associated with this. To complete the process maybe we should get the word out to our faculty about this and advise them how to update their firmware on any FW drives they own?
Panther deployment is young but FW drives are mobile and if a user plugs a non-upgraded FW drive into a Panther machine and restarts the machine (with a FW drive attached) the result could be data loss. I would hate for some of our users to loose data due to this fixable apparent incompatibility issue.

Posted: Tue - November 18, 2003 at 07:12 AM      

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