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Old 02-23-2003, 05:55 AM
salamander salamander is offline
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Angry Server unstable, locks up my machine

I read that if a window appears over the iTunes window on the server, bad things will happen. Presumably the server blindly grabs the frontmost window. Couldn't it be smarter than that?

After setting up the server, I still had the System Prefs open behind iTunes. I clicked on it (forbidden fruit and all that) and saw it appear on my client too. Things went downhill from there. before long the music went into a loop of a half second or so, and no matter what I tried I couldn't regain control. I couldn't even ssh in to the machine. Since my server is headless, I had no option but to reboot it.

OK, so don't let another window get in front of iTunes. Problem is, all sorts of things could do this. iCal alarms, software update, etc. Killing my server, which also hosts my site, is unacceptable.

What's worse, it happened again the other day within a couple of minutes of me starting it all up again. This wasn't the result of a window coming up in front of iTunes.

I really like what you've got going here, but I can't buy into your product until it's much more stable. I just can't risk my server like that. In the meantime, I'm back to using VNC.

My server is a Quicksilver G4 800 running OS X Server 10.2.3, and my client is a PowerBook G4 800.
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Old 02-23-2003, 09:05 AM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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First, let me apologise for any difficulty you've been experiencing. As you can see from the other messages in the forum, this is the first time this "looping problem" has been reported, and I'd certainly like to get to the bottom of it.

There are a few other issues here, so let me try to address each one:

- iTunes does, indeed, have to be "on top" for a seamless experience. I'd love for it to be "smarter" than that, but unfortunately there's no way to get at the "back buffer" -- the drawing area the compositor uses to create the screen image. So, I have to resort to screen scraping (which is what VNC, Apple Remote Desktop and everything else has to use as well).

- netTunes does tell iTunes to move "on top" when you initially connect -- if it's possible, it'll move to the top at that time.

- Having another window on top won't -- or rather, shouldn't -- impact your session: if you close that window (in the case of a dialog) or click on the iTunes window (if you can see it), it should move right to the top. If it's something that's forced "on top", it has to be dismissed manually. Note that sizing your iTunes window to close-to-fullscreen will allow these situations to be covered handily.

OK, so on to the "looping". That's really something I've never heard of before, at least in a specific-to-netTunes kind of way. Were you previously using iTunes with VNC without any difficulty? I do have quite a few users who operate netTunes "headless" without this kind of problem (my server is an iMac, so I can't remote the display to check, unfortunately).

netTunes isn't -- or rather, shouldn't be -- doing anything that would cause sound looping, since it doesn't really interact with the sound in any way. But there must be *something* going on that might explain things: when you say things "went downhill", did that happen as you were using the iTunes controls, the direct controls, or while playing with the System Preferenecs app? Had you disconnected and reconnected? Anything at all that might help point me in a direction that would allow reproduction of the problem?

Thanks for spending the time to contact me -- I'll do my best to get this taken care of.
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