If you're having problems with your network initializing upon startup, this tip might help. This stemmed from my system not initializing my Ethernet on boot and hence not having AppleTalk working. I couldn't print to my Personal Laser Writer 320, so I was fairly motivated to solve this one.
As a test to see if this fix will work for you, log in as root, cd to /System/Library/ and delete or move the "Extensions.mkext" file. Reboot. If your system takes about 6-8 minutes to reboot, and the NetInfo application in /Utilities/ which had never worked before will now come up and give you network information, this fix might work for you.
Read the rest of the article for the steps to take to implement this fix...
The problem is that the Extensions.mkext file that lives in /System/Library/ does not contain the necessary information to initialize the network on boot. This file is created by the rc script (/etc/rc) at this point:
if [ ! -f /System/Library/Extensions.mkext -o \If you do a man on kmextcache, you'll see that there is a "-n" option to load the system extensions that have the OSBundleRequired key set to "Network-Root". So, to force mkextcache to do this, edit the rc file in root mode and add the "-n� option. Mine looks like this:
/System/Library/Extensions.mkext -ot /System/Library/Extensions ]; then
if [ "${SafeBoot}" != "-x" ]; then
ConsoleMessage "Updating kernel extensions cache"
rm -f /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
/usr/sbin/mkextcache -l -t `arch` -o /System/Library/Extensions.mkext \
-d /System/Library/Extensions
fi
fi
/usr/sbin/mkextcache -l –n -t `arch` -oSave the rc script and again remove or rename the Extensions.mkext file in /System/Library/. Reboot.
/System/Library/Extensions.mkext \
-d /System/Library/Extensions
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