Dave had an interesting problem the other day - whilst the Xserve was functioning normally, he couldn’t access the server using either Apple Remote Desktop nor physically plugging a monitor into the back and the processor usage lights were just over half way. He was however, able to SSH in.

Rebooting the server was out of the question as people were working from it, so our intrepid tech spent the entire morning looking for a solution. It turned out that the CoreGraphics service had crashed, so killing it forced it to restart:

• First log into the machine as an administrator over SSH
• Type “ps -A” to list all processes
• Then type “kill PID” Where the PID is the number next to System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/
  CoreGraphics.framework/Resources/WindowServer -daemon

After you kill the process OS X will automatically restart it and all will be well again. This was performed on OS X 10.5 Leopard Server.

Tags: leopard, server, 10.5, xserve, terminal, ssh, CoreGraphics

So you've deleted the preferences five times, repaired disc permissions twice, fsck'ed the disc and even called Adobe support to find out why your copy of InDesign CS2 or CS3 freezes every time it starts up.
That's the problem I had the other day at a clients place and we couldn't find the solution anywhere, so I've decided to put it here.