[Macpartners] Support Status Update for Mac OS X 10.3

[Albert Willis]

Support Status Update for Mac OS X 10.3
---------------------------------------

Information Systems continues to recommend that users should not 
upgrade to Mac OS X 10.3 at this time--especially users that rely on 
Eudora 5.2.3, Virex 7.2.1 or iPass 2.3. We are continuing to work with 
Apple and application vendors on problems that we have found in 
testing. We expect to announce support for Mac OS X 10.3 in January.

Members of the MIT community who choose to upgrade should rely on 
self-support resources such as e-mail lists and the world wide web, not 
the Computing Help Desk, until Information Systems announces support 
for 10.3 and recommends that users upgrade.

The e-mail list macosx-help at mit.edu is a public list for MIT users to 
help each other; members of lists such as Mac Partners may also use 
those for help.

Users that purchase new machines with Mac OS X 10.3 pre-installed will 
be able to receive support for configuring their machines to connect to 
MITnet, print to networked printers and connecting to file servers. 
Information Systems will work with users to get supported applications 
working on Mac OS X 10.3, but unfortunately, the application vendors 
have not resolved all their issues with Mac OS X 10.3 at this time.

Background
----------

Mac OS X 10.3 contains some bugs, including data corruption by the 
FileVault feature and data loss on some external FireWire 800 drives. 
While Apple has begun to address these issues by releasing the 10.3.1 
update, we expect that future updates from Apple will address the 
operating system issues and some of the incompatibilities with 3rd 
party applications. We also expect updates from software vendors to 
provide improved compatibility with Mac OS X 10.3.

Known Issues
------------

Eudora 5.2.3
  - unable to use the Attach command,
  - SMTP authentication doesn't work unless a certificate is added to a 
keychain owned by the user
  - intermitted problems with sending e-mail

Virex 7.2.1
- some users have experienced Virex not completing scans of their home 
directory

iPass 2.3
- doesn't install or function correctly

On December 3rd, Qualcomm released Eudora 6.0.2, which has been updated 
to work with Mac OS X 10.3. We are evaluating this version of Eudora, 
however, we have not released an installer nor do we provide support 
for it. We are working with the vendors of Virex and iPass on solutions 
for Mac OS X 10.3.

More information on Mac OS X 10.3 at MIT is available at 
http://itinfo.mit.edu/product?vid=592.


Al Willis for the Mac OS X Release Team
   Deb Bowser
   Yang Gu
   Janet Littell