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Today there was a tricky computer problem to solve: Jan-Philipp finally updated his iBook with MacOS X.2 and it wouldn't start afterwards, seeming to kernel panic. Very strange - this hasn't happened to me ever before on a Mac (well I had a sad Mac once after I deliberately tempered with the system file in System 7, but that was neither surprising nor hard to fix). None of Apple's standard tips worked, it seemed that the system was crashing by far too early in the startup process for any of this to help.
To me this looks like a bad karma thing - I suspect Jan-Philipp wasn't nice enough to his iBook. Actually that karma thing wasn't my own idea. I first saw it many years ago in the golden days of the traditional EvangeList, when there was a motto that sabotaging other people's Windows machines isn't just fun and bad style but it will also bring you bad karma.
I first offered to back up the data so he could re-initialise the drive and do a clean install. Doing the backup worked nicely using FireWire target mode and the advantage of having all you data and settings in one place in your home folder. Sadly, it didn't solve the problem.
Finally, I decided to solve the problem in a classical Mac way - simply copy my system to his hard drive hoping that X.2.2 had resolved whatever problem there was. Now, sadly, these days you need tools like ditto and bless or Carbon Copy Cloner to achieve this rather than simply dragging things around in the Finder - but it worked. Seems like I spread some of my Powerbook's good karma over to the iBook.
Everything did work at that stage, which was before we wanted to change the name and home directory of the main user, trying to be clever at doing this an fucking up NetInfo so there wasn't any Admin user left in the process. Bummer! Copying over my NetInfo settings again, fixed that.
While it is a charm to use for this kind of copying, I assume that the FireWire target mode and CD booting must raise lots of security concerns in system administrators. Tough.