Tried to update and all hell broke lose

Rob Lewis rob at whidbey.com
Sun Nov 1 16:43:57 EST 2015


Aw, geez, now I feel like a real troublemaker! Really sorry about this :-(

My bet is that there are literally tens of X Server customers using the Xcode feature. 

I like X Server in principle, but after struggling with it off and on since OS X 10.2, I’m not sure it’s been worth the trouble. 

For those interested, an excellent diagnosis was written by Chuck Goolsbee on the occasion of the discontinuance of the XServe hardware: http://db.tidbits.com/article/11735 
The money paragraph: 

> Mac OS X Server does an excellent job of meeting the basic needs of Apple’s traditional customer base in terms of managing user accounts, setting up email, file sharing, and so on. But anyone who tries to extend Mac OS X Server beyond those boundaries quickly discovers its limitations. The problem is that Mac OS X Server’s key benefit was that it provided a graphical interface for the Unix server software running under the hood. Unfortunately, Mac OS X Server’s graphical administration tools have never been fully fleshed out, and system administrators soon learned to bypass them and perform all administration tasks from the command line or with Web-based administration tools. Worse, the graphical and command line approaches were often at odds. Many actions taken in the Server Admin application, for instance, or even upgrades, would overwrite configuration files edited at the command line in ways that weren’t possible from within Server Admin, causing no end of frustration.


The early versions were terrible in this way: use the command line once, and you could never go back to the GUI without screwing things up royally (of course you weren’t warned about this). In fairness, things have gotten considerably better since then (X Server has made it possible for me to run web, email, Time Machine, and DNS servers without too much pain), but it is still a somewhat strange animal. On the plus side, it’s really, really cheap! 





> On Nov 1, 2015, at 12:54 , James Sentman <james at sentman.com> wrote:
> 
> 65535 TCP ports to choose from and they pick mine? That seems too coincident for anything but malice, obviously we’re a threat to the transcendence of home kit ;)   
> 
> I’m sure that they aren’t just holding the ports themselves but are probably configured via the launchd system to be run whenever a connection on those ports is attempted, so the configuration is beyond them. You could dig through the launchd settings and find and delete them, they might be in /Library/LaunchDemons or /LIbrary/LaunchAgents, but they are likely hidden somewhere else in the system. Maybe even inside xCode itself and loaded into the system somewhere.
> 
> An easier solution will be for me to change the port numbers. This is not a big deal, or shouldn’t be, though it’s not something I’ve ever tested. I’ve been using that port since oh, 2004 or so? Maybe earlier.
> 
> I will do a special build of XTension and XTdb by the morning that changes the port or possibly provide an interface for changing it.
> 
> In the meantime don’t anybody else turn on the XCode helpers in El Capitan server.
> 
> 
> 
>> On Nov 1, 2015, at 3:04 PM, Rob Lewis <rob at whidbey.com> wrote:
>> 
>> The ports listed are: TCP 20300, 20343–20345
>> 
>> Activity Monitor reveals these daemons running: xcsbuildd, xcscontrol, and xcsdeviced. This in spite of the fact that I have the Xcode service turned off (though I was experimenting with it a couple of days ago). 
>> 
>> Hypothesis: one of these daemons is latching onto port 20300 and blocking XTension, even though the service is turned off! (Does XTension use UDP or TCP?) 
>> 
>> This seems ripe for causing problems. What the heck can I do about it? I just tried force-quitting all 3 and it doesn't seem to work. 
>> 
>> A bit more suggestive evidence: XTension seemed fine until the day I started tinkering with Xcode Service. 
>> 
> 
> Thanks,
> James
> 
> 
> James Sentman                       http://sentman.com		http://MacHomeAutomation.com
> 
> 
> 
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