I work with Terminal a lot, and often have 30 to 40 windows open, each running my shell and

• Newest Mac Os System
• There Are Limits Mac Os X

ssh

Mac OS X may be unstable with more than sixteen partitions up to sixteen partitions on a external drive. Also I understand that in a sixteen-slice environment, the full installer for OS X Mountain Lion may be unable to add an AppleBoot slice for Recovery OS. If there's a limit.

. Add in all the other processes, and I quickly exceed the 100

Newest Mac Os System

maxprocperuid limit that OS X defaults to.

1. OS X Server 10.4.7: /etc/sysctl-macosxserver.conf check limit with: launchctl limit use above comments for adding temporarily if needed instead of commiting changes to system via conf file. /etc/launchd.conf does not exist on OS X Server 10.4.7 and none of the affore mentioned files appear to exist on my OS X Client 10.4.7 computer.
2. There are/were 250GB and 500GB variants out there, but the specs call for LBA48 or multiple partitions, dependent on how the OS/firmware sees/maps the disk as a whole. I had my own experience with Pentium III era machines not being able to partition a 250GB IDE disk due to sector bounds issues with the BIOS so YMMV.
3. There are multiple ways to do this. App Limits, and Content. With these in place your child should now be able to use their Mac without encountering any of the nasty stuff online, but of.
4. There's one major snag: The OS X installer enforces the 8GB limitation, so you can't normally install OS X to a large partition. This can be worked around by backing up a supported install.

There have been many proposed solutions to this. You can, for instance, in your shell startup scripts override the limit for that shell instance, and you can run more than 100 processes from that shell, but when you launch a new window, the parent process that launches all apps for you in the GUI is still limited to that 100 process per user limit, and the new window will fail to launch your shell. It usually fails with the error: login: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable.

There are two phases to fixing this problem. First you must change the overall OS limits for maxproc and maxprocperuid to higher values, and then you must make WindowServer run in an environment with the limits raised.
[robg adds: I have not tested this one, nor do I intend to! If you're going to experiment with it, I recommend you have a good backup first, just in case...]
System Wide
OS X 10.3 now supports the standard /etc/sysctl.conf. This means you can just put new values into this file and reboot. This is what the file looks like: Daemons /etc/rc.common
All of the daemons that are started via /System/Library/StartupItems are started with the default maxproxperuid of 100. This might not normally be a problem, as root may not run a ton of processes, but it does matter when sshd is started up. On OS X, sshd is started out of xinetd. A quick way to affect the environment of xinetd, and all other daemons as well, is to put ulimit -u 512 at the top of /etc/rc.common. If you preferred, you could just edit the startup script for xinetd instead, which is in /System -> Library -> StartupItems -> IPServices -> IPServices.

Here is a snippet of the top of my /etc/rc.common file: WindowServer
Every process you run from the GUI is launched by WindowServer. So we need to make WindowServer launch in such a way that it has its limits raised. I cannot determine what actually launches WindowServer. Its parent process is mach_init, and I can find no way to modify how it is launched directly. You can, however, write a wrapper script for WindowServer. This is a shell script that is launched instead of WindowServer itself which sets the limits properly, then launches the original WindowServer as normal.

1. Become root on command line.
   
2. robg adds: Yes, you can do that as one long cd command; I snipped it apart for narrower display width.
   
3. Type mv WindowServer WindowServer.orig
   
4. Type vi WindowServer ... below is the script I used; the last two lines should be entered as one long line with no extra spaces in it:
5. Type chmod a+rx WindowServer
   
6. Type reboot

How I Tested
To quickly test if my solution was working I ran a bunch of sleep0 processes in the background. This was able to reproduce the problem for me on demand before the fix. I'd open one shell window, launch over 100 sleeps, and then try to launch a new Terminal window, and it would fail. After the fix, it works.

Click here to return to the 'A real workaround for the 8GB limit on older Macs' hint

Since submitting this hint, I've learned that it won't work on any Mac with built-in USB -- XPostFacto doesn't support these models, at least not yet.
Sorry!

I got around this limitation on a Beige G3 by:
1. Installing a PCI ATA card (SIIG Ultra ATA, $74 from www.macsales.com)
2. Installing a larger ATA hard drive (20GB Maxtor, pull from other machine)
Very worthwhile and I have no problems whatsoever. This machine is a webserver so it's on 24/7.
James

I am setting up some older computer with x.2 one is a g3 desktop, a g3 all in one and a g3 server.
I am trying to install but when I get done with the first disk the system reboots into x and then I get a no sysmbol on the screen.
what can I do to get things going in x with any of these machines?

There Are Limits Mac Os X

This is an ancient hint but is still probably relevant to some of you out there. Just to confirm the post about using a pci card and that it is truly the best way to get around the 8GB limit on an older beige G3 system. I use a Sonnet Tempo Trio with 4 250GB drives. I currently boot from a 100GB 10.4.6 partition. Haven't had any problems to speak of for years regarding this issue. It's been a while but if I remember correctly the problem lies with the onboard ATA controller itself. Or possibly the rom. My rom only allows a single master off the onboard controller while there is a replacement rom out there that allows for master/slave configurations. I don't know if this newer rom has the same 8GB limit. Either way a new controller will get you around this limit.
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- Jase