HELIOS Tech Info #135

HELIOS server authentication against  AD/PDC  on Mac OS X Server

HELIOS server solutions running on Mac OS X Server (10.6 or 10.7) do not work properly if AD/PDC authentication is enabled. In this case HELIOS uses new user and group IDs which derive from the AD/PDC accounts. Several Mac OS X system functions, including “getpwuid” and “syslog”, will hang or crash when using processes running under these new user/group IDs. Example error message of this problem are:

2011-02-03 15:33:00 system.log turtle com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.launchd.peruser.50332757[1561]): getpwuid("50332757") failed

2011-02-03 15:33:00 system.log turtle com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.launchd.peruser.50332757[1561]): Exited with exit code: 1

2011-02-03 15:33:00 system.log turtle com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.launchd.peruser.50332757): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

We reported this problem to Apple, however they have not addressed this issue yet. We have tried several workarounds for some time but with each new Mac OS X version switching to non built-in user IDs produces the above described errors. The HELIOS AD/PDC support works fine on any other UNIX server operating system, except for newer Mac OS X versions.

Therefore we cannot support AD/PDC authentication on Mac OS X until Apple addresses this issue. We will update this “Tech Info” document as soon as we have new information concerning this issue.