Possible problem with (un)installing on Mac OS X 10.9 Guest user account

[aaaaalbert]

@yyzhuang reports an install/uninstall problem on Mac OS X 10.9 (IIRC) using the Guest user account, see below.

The problem looks cron-related. Even on 10.6, man launchd already included a note reading

In Darwin, the canonical way to launch a daemon is through launchd as opposed to more traditional mechanisms or mechanisms provided in earlier versions of Mac OS X. These alternate methods should be considered deprecated and not suitable for new projects.

Maybe it's time to finally switch to launchd...

---

Error log:

seattle Guest$ ./install.sh
System benchmark starting...
Benchmark complete and vessels created!
Preparing Seattle to run automatically at startup...
Attempting to add an entry to the crontab...
seattle could not be configured to run automatically at machine boot.
Following are more details:
The cron allow and deny files, which specify which users have
permission to use the cron service, cannot be found.  If seattle is not
able to be configured to run automatically at startup, it may be that your
user name needs to be added to the cron allow file. The location of this
cron allow file can be found in the man document for crontab (found by
running the command 'man crontab' from the terminal).
seattle could not be installed to run automatically at startup for the
following reason: global name 'config' is not defined
Continuing with the installation process now.  To manually run seattle
at any time, just run start_seattle.sh from within the seattle directory.
Please contact the seattle project for further assistance.
Generating the Node Manager RSA keys.  This may take a few minutes...
Keys generated!
Starting seattle...
seattle has been started: Fri 19 Sep 2014 16:48:59 PDT
seattle has been installed!
To learn more about useful, optional scripts related to running
seattle, see the README file.

r1-131:seattle Guest$ ./uninstall.sh 
Seattle was not detected as having been installed.

[aaaaalbert]

@XuefengHuang reports this error from a machine updated to 10.10:

172-16-25-14:seattle guest1$ ./install.sh
System benchmark starting...
sysctl: unknown oid 'kern.ipc.maxsockets'
Benchmark failed for insockets resource: unable to find max number of sockets
Benchmark failed for outsockets resource: unable to find max number of sockets
The above benchmarking error(s) occurred.
If you choose to continue anyways then default values will be used for failed benchmarks.
Failed.
This install cannot succeed either because required installation info is corrupted or resources are insufficient.
Please email the Seattle project for additional support, and attach the installer_benchmark.log and vesselinfo files, found in the seattle_repy directory, in order to help us diagnose the issue.

Interestingly, onl ythe guest user account seems to lack kern.ipc.maxsockets; the normal user accounts have it.

[aaaaalbert]

...only until we retried, and now the normal user account doesn't show kern.ipc.maxsockets either. What's going on there???

[holmjoel]

Does anyone know how to solve this? I'm running into the same problem. That is when installing on OS X 10.10 the benchmarking fails as in the comment above.

[aaaaalbert]

Was your Mac shipped with OS X 10.10, or did you upgrade from an earlier version (as was done on the machine mentioned above)?

Also, did you try this under your normal user account, or Guest?

[holmjoel]

It was updated and I did as my normal user.

[aaaaalbert]

Did you see the cron error or the sysctl one?

[aaaaalbert]

Just tried on a freshly installed 10.10.5 box (with SeattleTestbed/resource#7 in place, so as to not run into the sysctl kern.ipc.maxsockets error), and saw this, https://github.com/SeattleTestbed/installer-packaging/blob/master/all-platforms/seattleinstaller.py#L1522-L1531:

seattle was configured to start automatically at machine startup; however, an error occured when trying to detect if cron, the program that starts seattle at machine startup, is actually running. If cron is not running, then seattle will NOT automatically start up at machine boot. Please check with the root user to confirm that cron is installed and indeed running. Also confirm that you have access to use cron.

[aaaaalbert]

This was under a normal user account.

[aaaaalbert]

Trying on the Guest user account:

machine:~ Guest$ crontab -e
crontab: you (Guest) are not allowed to use this program

Consequently, I get the same error message from the Seattle installer that @yyzhuang reported originally.

[aaaaalbert]

Another remark: On 10.6.8, the nodemanager process from an install as Guest will continue to run after logging out if I don't uninstall. On 10.10.5, the process is killed (as I think it should be).