Apple Repair Privileges Utility

[RichB]

Apple released this utility to help people with specific problems I am not having but out of curiosity I ran it and it fixed a whole bunch of files! The log had hundreds of listings the first time for two different Macs. The second time it was run, of course, no problems were found. I can't notice any difference, yet... Anyone have any similar, good or bad experiences running this utility?

Apple Repair Priveleges Utility (http://kbase.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/kbase.woa/wa/query?searchMode=Expert&type=id&val=KC.106900)

[mervTormel]

similar experience to yours. "fixed" a lot of files, some i was quite surprised about. no "ill" effects, yet, but i haven't run every blinking code path in every app with every circumstance (yet) :D

please note these points:

- it relies on accurate and effective entries in the /Library/Receipts dir. those are the turds that some installers drop in there.

- you should save its log file so you have an audit for "future anomolies"

[dbhill]

Ran Apple Repair Privileges on 10.1.5 having no problems. I was astonished at the number of repairs made. Saved a text file of the repair log: 864kb and 10,500 lines or privilege modifications.

Been running OS X since day one, ran every incremental update and upgraded all my legacy software from Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, etc. I've tinkered a little in Terminal but never suspected this much destruction to privileges in the course of things and still have flawless operation of hardware and software. This is one amazing OS.

~Dennis

[AKcrab]

Originally posted by dbhill
864kb and 10,500 lines or privilege modifications.
:eek: Damn!
Can you run this thing with an 'echo' so you can see what it will do before you do it?

[mervTormel]

Originally posted by AKcrab
Can you run this thing with an 'echo' so you can see what it will do before you do it?
no. but Larry Prall's chkstuff script runs a similar mechanism that builds a script to run which you can examine before unleashing hell.

one of the downsides of insulating users from the gutti-wuts of systems with pretty GUI apps is not letting us have control or examination of such things :mad:

[AKcrab]

Originally posted by mervTormel

no. but Larry Prall's chkstuff script runs a similar mechanism that builds a script to run which you can examine before unleashing hell.
Maybe I'll check that out.
one of the downsides of insulating users from the gutti-wuts of systems with pretty GUI apps is not letting us have control or examination of such things :mad:
Now merv... They could have added a "test" or "preview" or "report only" function to the GUI. The fact that they chose not to is not a GUI problem, but a programming problem, no?

[dbhill]

Well of course you can run it as an echo to see what happens before it happens.... Just run it on your duplicated backup volume. You have one of these, don't you?

~Dennis

[AKcrab]

Originally posted by dbhill
Well of course you can run it as an echo to see what happens before it happens.... Just run it on your duplicated backup volume. You have one of these, don't you?

~Dennis
Funny. I typed in "backup" in Mac OS Help, and there were no results.

:D ;)

[mervTormel]

Originally posted by AKcrab
...Now merv... They could have added a "test" or "preview" or "report only" function to the GUI. The fact that they chose not to is not a GUI problem, but a programming problem, no?
these gizmos are not designed and developed in a vacuum. i'm sure developers considered ( preview ) but marketing / tech support won the battle with the proclamation "good god! every newbie in the world will call asking for explanation on 10,000 files! they'll drain our precious bodily fluids! we'll be out of business in a week!"

[AKcrab]

:D I bet it was the marketing department. I blame everything on marketing departments!
I may be biased due to my duties as a tech....

[RichB]

The marketing guys probably wanted to sell this utility and only charge a penny per fix!

Maybe there was some Jaguar compliance technical reason for all the privelege and group changes made. Still no noticeable difference here.:cool:

[mervTormel]

i'm having some setsid errors with netinfod.

i don't know if it's related yet.

completely hosed earlier today; couldn't boot, hang on pre-startup blue-screen.

beware. this is what it looks like...

$ grep -C setsid /var/log/system.log
...
Jul 4 16:34:03 gunther mach_kernel: ipfw_load
Jul 4 16:34:03 gunther mach_kernel: IP packet filtering initialized, divert enabled, rule-based forwarding enabled, default to accept, logging disabled
Jul 4 16:34:04 gunther netinfod local[253]: setsid failed: Operation not permitted
Jul 4 16:34:04 gunther lookupd[260]: lookupd (version 233.2) starting - Thu Jul 4 16:34:04 2002
Jul 4 16:34:05 gunther lookupd[260]: NetInfo connection timeout: RPC: Timed out on initial connection to 127.0.0.1/local
--
Jul 4 18:33:21 gunther mach_kernel: ipfw_load
Jul 4 18:33:21 gunther mach_kernel: IP packet filtering initialized, divert enabled, rule-based forwarding enabled, default to accept, logging disabled
Jul 4 18:33:22 gunther netinfod local[254]: setsid failed: Operation not permitted
Jul 4 18:33:22 gunther lookupd[261]: lookupd (version 233.2) starting - Thu Jul 4 18:33:22 2002
Jul 4 18:33:23 gunther lookupd[261]: NetInfo connection timeout: RPC: Timed out on initial connection to 127.0.0.1/local

[blb]

Originally posted by mervTormel
i'm having some setsid errors with netinfod.

i don't know if it's related yet.

FYI, my last boot has the same error,

system.log.2.gz:Jul 1 21:37:51 nabu netinfod local[193]: setsid failed: Operation not permitted

but all has been running fine since...No RPC timeout from lookupd, however.

[RichB]

OK, I'm getting these "localhost netinfod local[216]: setsid failed: Operation not permitted" also. I don't know if they were there before running this Apple Repair Priveleges Utility (ARPU). No crashes or problems yet... Is ARPU pooh-pooh? ;)

The man page is clear as mud:

The setsid function creates a new session. The calling process is the
session leader of the new session, is the process group leader of a new
process group and has no controlling terminal. The calling process is
the only process in either the session or the process group.

Upon successful completion, the setsid function returns the value of the
process group ID of the new process group, which is the same as the pro-
cess ID of the calling process

[mervTormel]

i don't have record of these setsid errors before the repair utility, and the error germane to the setsid(2) man page entry seems specious.

i would wonder if the error itself is erroneous, or misleading.

but it was havok here earlier with /etc/hostconfig entry NETINFOSERVER=-YES-

had to set it to -NO- , rather than -AUTOMATIC- to get a good boot.

developing...

[blb]

Heh, I suppose my previous post would be a bit more meaningful if I didn't forget to mention I have not run the Repair Utility on my machine.

Also, merv, my hostconfig has no NETINFOSERVER at all, so maybe simply removing it may be the "proper" way.

[mervTormel]

Originally posted by blb
Also, merv, my hostconfig has no NETINFOSERVER at all, so maybe simply
removing it may be the "proper" way.
nein! netinfoserver=-yes- was a way to get nibindd to run on a lonely host so
that netinfo manager could 'backup' without errors...

$ cat /System/Library/StartupItems/DirectoryServices/DirectoryServices

#!/bin/sh

. /etc/rc.common

##
# Start up NetInfo
##

ConsoleMessage "Starting NetInfo"

...
##
# Start NetInfo services
##

##
# nibindd is required if there are NetInfo domains other than "local", or
# if the local domain has any non-loopback values for "trusted_networks".
##
if [ "${NETINFOSERVER:=-AUTOMATIC-}" = "-AUTOMATIC-" ]; then
NETINFOSERVER=-YES-
ni_not_local=$(/bin/ls -1d /var/db/netinfo/*.nidb | \
sed 's:/var/db/netinfo/local.nidb::' | wc -w)
ni_local_export=$(nicl -raw /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb \
-read / trusted_networks | sed 's/trusted_networks://' | \
sed 's/127[^ ]*//g' | wc -w)
total=$(($ni_not_local + $ni_local_export))
if [ "${total}" -eq 0 ]; then
NETINFOSERVER=-NO-
fi
fi

##
# If nibindd is not required, we just start the local NetInfo daemon.
##
if [ "${NETINFOSERVER}" = "-YES-" ]; then
nibindd
else
cd /var/db/netinfo
netinfod -s local
cd /
fi

now, i'm frotzed with errors/hangs on startup of the setsid kind. i did a single-user
start and got the syslogd running and let it go so it could log startup errors. all
boiled down to a setsid error somewhere, but where?

if i hand start nibindd, it hangs, and after a few minutes, i'm dumped into darwin
with a 'terminate on signal 15'

i can only find two google entries about 'setsid failed' that are apropos, and they're
not apropos.