Mac Trivia: Zero Byte resource error
You can probably skip this post. I wanted to blog it to help people with this problem solve it faster. It involves the Mac System update tool throwing up a dialog that says:
A networking error has occurred: zero byte resource (-1014). Make sure you can connect to the Internet, then try again.
I was over helping a friend upgrade his mac, and he got that error. Others have gotten it too, but googling and finding the answer is strangely hard. I was able to solve it since I’d had the same problem in the past.
The fix is to set the network MTU to 1400. In a terminal, run sudo ifconfig en1 mtu 1400 you’ll be asked for your password. Then do crontab -u root -e and in that file, type “@reboot ifconfig en1 mtu 1400“. Save it and quit.
[Update 7 April 2005: I just added the important word “mtu” to the first both commands. Without that, this wouldn’t work.]