Terminal commands help in 10.6.8?

[mc6845]

Long-time lurker, first time poster… I’m looking for help with terminal commands in 10.6.8. I have a macmini4,1 (mid 2010, fresh install of 10.6.8) that is crashing if left idle for several hours, and console logs are of no help whatsoever to figuring out what's going on.

Can any of you fine folks help with terminal commands to enter to produce a crash report?

Also if you have recommendations of commands to run to disable system things that ‘phone home’ or want to connect to outside services, that would be helpful too.

This machine is never going to be on the internet, I don’t need mail or browser connectivity or anything like that; it’s running VLC and maybe a couple other old apps, so the more I can streamline its behaviour, the better.

 

[Basic75]

When is the last time the machine was installed from scratch (installing the OS after formatting the built-in drive)?

 

[mc6845]

Freshly formatted drive, system installed 5 days ago. It isn't the original drive, I bought the machine used a few years ago and it already had an ssd installed, and I think I put a different one in anyway when I got it. It had 10.11 on it when I got it, and I downgraded to 10.9 for years, and then 10.8.5 for another few years, and now have brought it back down to 10.6.8 to run some older stuff. Installed the system from the dvd (burned disc, but the mac mini specific one), AHT won't run - tried it. It's always had odd issues, 10.9 wouldn't shut down, 10.8.5 sometimes crashed in sleep and it seemed it was either a dodgy usb mouse (since discarded) and / or it attempting to connect to depreciated icloud servers, but in 10.6.8 there's nothing I can find in the console that sheds any light now. I kind of suspect the crashes are because of connected usb devices (trackball, audio interface), and the easy solution is "shut the computer down when you're done with it", but I would like to know the terminal tools to get more info, because of curiousity. I have no plans to put newer systems on it again, just want it to behave if at all possible.

 

[NewbiePPC]

Hi, generally all the logs are stored in different locations, no need to do anything just go to /Applications/Utilities/ and open Console. From there you can find logs from kenel, system and so on. But if you suspect that it's USB maybe looking at kernel logs it's good place to start.

As a side note, I have a MBP 09 that has similar specs, and it behaves weird with some SSD's, its slow, barely usable. System profiler identifies at the correct speed and have trim enabled with the tool, but in particular a cheap 500Gb Kingston SA400 sometimes boot fine and others its just slower than a 4200 IDE HDD or usb2 hdd.

 

[mc6845]

To add a resolution to this: it turned out that all the issues were due to a dead PRAM battery! It took a while of fiddling and troubleshooting to get to that point of "maybe try that"; at first I swapped the original battery our for a CR2032 - the unpredictable shut-downs got WAY worse. But once I acquired and installed a BR2032 battery, it settled down and has been a dream ever since. I don't pretend to understand exactly WHY this was the fix that fixed it, but for this finnicky little tank, it was successful.