Kernel Panic
Posted 09/08/2009 - 19:41 by Brian Myrick
Everybody has heard of Window's Blue Screen of Death. Few know what the Mac equiavlent of that is. Technically, it is called a Kernel Panic and it crashes your system hard.
Since upgrading to Snow Leopard, I've had more kernel panics in 1 week than I've had since I switched to Macs when XP SP1 came out years ago - combined.
So what's up with that? Talk about being frustrated! This is the whole reason I switched in the first place. Has Apple gone the way of their neighbors to the north.
I hope not. I believe I have discovered the problem I was having. As you may know, Snow Leopard comes with built-in support for Cisco VPNs. I needed to VPN to a client a day or two after I upgraded, and they use Cisco for their VPN solution.
The Cisco client I had installed no longer worked. No problem - I'll use the built in Cisco client. Except, I didn't have access to the connection information to configure the new internal client. So I re-installed the Cisco client.
While that solved my problem, it created the kernel panics. It took a while for me to figure it out and realize what was going on. But all I had to do was remove the Cisco kernel extensions from my system, and I haven't had a panic since.
Apple's crash reports could have been a lot more helpful to me figuring this out. But at least my system is stable again.
And thanks to Snow Leopard, faster than ever.
