The Brad Hole

I ran into an interesting problem with 10.3.8 yesterday. Upon installing the update, I restarted and shortly thereafter got several nasty warnings that I had run out of disk space on my startup volume. At first, this didn't worry me too much - I'd been down to about 3 gigs of space left the last time I checked a few months back, and it didn't seem inconceivable to me that I'd accidentally blown by that recently. I deleted 8 gigs of old crap and went on my way.

This morning, I woke up to a Mac in deep trouble. Overnight, it had spawned a number of warning dialogs about running out of disk space again. This was pretty surprising to me, so I quickly ditched a few more gigs of junk, restarted and started digging for the root cause. I could watch my disk usage drop by a few hundred megs each minute, so I didn't have unlimited time.

It turns out that the MacAlly iShock driver was having some big issues with 10.3.8. It pegged the CPU usage at close to 100%, which was clearly not right. I killed that and the disk usage stabilized a bit. Upon further investigation, the iShock driver was totally filling up the system log with error messages. My system.log file was 8 gigs in size, and the console.log file from yesterday was another 4.5 gigs. Yowza!

Luckily, the iShock driver is pretty much worthless (it adds the questionable ability to drive the mouse cursor with the joystick) so I haven't lost anything. As an added bonus, I've got way more disk space on my startup disk now. :-) This problem is also noted today on macfixit.com, so hopefully affected people will see it.

If you've got the iShock driver and are having this problem, you can find the driver in /Library/Application Support - just delete the "iShock*" files and you're good to go. Also, system.log lives in /var/log and your console.log file lives in /Library/Logs/Console/<your user name>. If your log file is massive like mine was, don't try to view it in the Console app - it'll take forever - or at least longer than the minute or two I waited. ;-)