WTF bug in OS X 10.7
I know I’m WAY behind on blogging. I really hope I’ll find some time ASAP. I wanna talk really quickly about Mac OS X 10.7.
First the good. The UI changes are great. I have always been a fan of tiny widgets and maximizing screen real-estate. In 10.6 and prior, I went to great lengths to shrink every font and widget. In 10.7 theres no need. Scroll bars are tiny and automatically fade out, you can full screen most apps, fonts and widgets are just smaller. Fantastic. New UI animations and transitions are everywhere and delay things a bit, hopefully there will be a TinkerTool or similar to disable them. They’re short and tolerable but as an example, I am typing a character or two into the ether when switching spaces during the animation. I’m not really into the LaunchPad paradigm, but the MasterControl look works for me. Mail.app’s new UI is fantastic, iCal’s is a bit over the top. Mail.app’s performance (specifically around large operations and anything RSS related) is a complete train wreck. I expect a patch soon. Reverse scrolling took less than a day to adjust to (I am an iPad/iPhone user though). Autocorrect is a nice addition. The new Finder is great, Safari updates seem good, heck even the Terminal.app updates are nice! Grab an updated version of TerminalCopyOnSelect and away you go.
10.7 is a huge update, in the way 10.5 was to 10.4, and at $29. If Mail.app’s performance is fixed I’ll likely be very happy.
Here’s a very WTF bug though. I ran into it last night and figured it was just me, or I’d boned something up. I have a bunch of shell scripts that do SSH port forwards for accessing network appliances and infrastructure behind lock and key. Half of them stopped working on me, failing to resolve their respective hosts. How strange. Amusingly Brandon was complaining of basically the same problem this morning so we decided to take a look.
Some how OS X’s resolver library is no longer checking any hostname with a dot in it against the /etc/resolv.conf search directive in 10.7. Seriously. Let’s say I have a server called admin.omghi2u.com. My /etc/resolv.conf (and OS X network control panel) contain omghi2u.com in the search field. Surely, we can resolve (ping, ssh, web browse, whatever) to ‘admin’ since it can match that as admin.omghi2u.com. Cool. Now normally, in UNIX (heck even Windows land!) if I had admin.tor.omghi2u.com and admin.chi.omghi2u.com, simply hitting ‘admin.tor’ or ‘admin.chi’ would match the omghi2u.com hostnames. Not the case in 10.7. Something is clearly broken in the resolver in libSystem. Oddly despite being linked to the same library, the host command still functions properly… Maybe the search logic is handled by the command itself…
While it’s a simple bug fix, its an annoying oversight on Apples part. Breaking basic UNIX networking functionality is kinda shameful.
UPDATE (JULY 26th): Head over to Brandon’s site for a fix!