Damien,
Thanks for the feedback. Replies inline...
Damien Sorresso <mailto:dsorre...@apple.com>
November 5, 2015 at 9:32 AM
James,
Answers inline...
On 4 Nov, 2015, at 21:44, James Bucanek<subscri...@gloaming.com> wrote:
Greetings,
I have a user agent installed in the "Background" session that isn't starting
up on one system.
The Background session is typically only useful for agents which you want to run "as
the user" independently of whether that user is logged in. In the strictest terms,
you can't even rely on the home directory for that user being available. So you should be
sure that this is the session you really want.
I understand. This is exactly the session I want. My product has an
option ("Start and run actions when logged out") that allows you install
the scheduler agent the "Background" session so that backups and other
maintenance can be performed even when logged out (or because you've
logged out).
My customer is running OS X 10.11.1. I have this software running on hundreds
of El Capitan systems, but for some reason this user agent won't start when the
user logs in.
I've found two things that are suspicious. First, a message like this appears
in the console log:
system.log: Oct 31 17:45:05 UsersMac otherbsd[488]: Failed to bootstrap agent:
path = /Users/theuser/Library/LaunchAgents/com.qrecall.scheduler.plist, error =
134: Service cannot load in requested session
I was really hoping that someone could tell me what error 134 means.
The string representation of the error is printed right after it. Also, you can decode
launchd's error codes with the `launchctl error` subcommand; in this case it'll print
"Service cannot load in requested session".
What this means is that one of launchd's helpers, otherbsd, tried loading the
com.qrecall.scheduler service into the user's Aqua session. The plist almost
certainly specifies a LimitLoadToSessionType entry which says it can only load
in the Background session. So launchd refuses to load the service.
So that begs two questions:(1) Why is the service being loaded in the
Aqua session? (That might be an artifact of something that's loading it
into a session it's excluded from. I get that, and I suppose that could
be ignored.)
(2) More importantly, why isn't it being loaded into the Background
session when that session is created?
I'm surprised that you say that the home folder might not be available
when the Background session is created. How is that possible? The user
agent configuration file
(~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.qrecall.scheduler.plist) is _inside_ the
home folder. How would launchd load an agent service *before* the
configuration file that defines that service is readable?
Anyway, I really hope that's never true, because my service has always
depended on resources in the home folder (preferences, cache, documents,
and such). And in this case, the service executable is also stored in
~/Library/Application Support/, so the home folder has to be available
if it's going to start (and it always starts on other systems).
But I'll also ask the user if they're doing anything "clever" with their
home folder.
Thanks for any insight,
James
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