a crank's progress

AT&T Broadband’s connection to the house went down today a little after 1 PM. I called their tech support line and learned the earliest they could send a tech was June 17, 9 days later.

And they wonder why I don’t want AT&T to handle my local phone service?

As it turns out, service was restored about 2 hours later. I unplugged the “modem” and let it sit, then powered it back up a couple of times: finally, after I had rigged the airport base station to handle calling out and routing LAN traffic, the status lights indicated service was restored. Sure enough . . . .

Or perhaps I should call it the missing bits.

• no file retrieval software tools (curl or wget) are installed in Darwin. So bootstrapping fink or other improvements are pretty hard to do.
• console logging seems to be missing. In OS X you can use ConsoleMessage to write to the Console application’s log: there is no such animal in an aqua-less environment. System.log does not pick up the slack.
• the /Library/StartupItems directory is not created at installation time. OS 9 created folders without contents, why shouldn’t the newer OSes, especially if they’re supposed to be used?
• it’s not clear that StartupItems are handled the same as on OS X: I know startup scripts that don’t reference trigger values in /etc/hostconfig will never start and I think OS X is more flexible, but I haven’t tested it lately. The hostconfig file is mentioned twice in the overview to OS X and this dependency/requirement is never mentioned.
• Console logging seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor: the function ConsoleMessage in /etc/rc.common will dump into /private/var/tmp/console.log on OS X, but there’s no such place in Darwin. I added some stuff to rc.common to address this, but I’m sure someone at Apple or OpenDarwin could come up with something better.

My suspicion is that Apple may have cut too deep when they split Darwin off from OS X and took off a little too much.

I have read through “Inside Mac OS X: System Overview” and as an overview, it’s great, but as a guide to implementation, it’s not as valuable. It’s a little too non-commital on what may be supported in future: that suggests to me that given the choice of following the spec or copying what’s known to work, you go with what works and let the spec catch up.
Continue reading “Darwin wishlist”

StartupItems bundles:

Use this one for fink-managed SNMP builds and this one if you’re using darwinports.

This version checks for the existence of the config file and exits with a helpful message if it isn’t there.

It also logs the process ID in /private/var/run/snmpd.pid.

You can put this in /System/Library/StartupItems or /Library/StartupItems: don’t forget to add SNMP=-YES- to /etc/hostconfig.

(as root or sudo -s) cat >> /etc/hostconfig
SNMP=-YES-
[Ctrl-D]

There is some debate about how this is supposed to work. I have, I think, confirmed that having the startup executable verify that it is supposed to run in /etc/hostconfig is what’s supposed to happen.

But now I’m hearing that there are two StartupItems directories: /System/Library/StartupItems, reserved for factory-installed stuff, and /Library/StartupItems for site-specific stuff (why not /Local/Library/StartupItems?).

Darwin machines only have the first directory. I gather most people are running the full OS X installation.

It seems to me Apple needs some help sorting all this out: I need a job of some kind. Hmm, perhaps some of the Apple employees who keep dropping by could look over my resume (down on your right).

<another clarification from Creed Erickson on the missing /Library/StartupItems directory>

Create it.

Well, if I am going to create it, I would just as soon call it /Local/Library/StartupItems.

This could be documented a little better, as could the stuff about /etc/hostconfig, without which none of the rest of this matters.