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Laptops have Retrospect turned off on restart


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We are having a problem with two laptops running OS X. Both are running 10.3.6 and both are Powerbooks about two years old. We are running a Backup server so whenever they hit the network they get backed up.

 

All of this works just fine until one of them has to be rebooted. After the reboot the Retrospect client is always turned off and has to be manually re-enabled. This is happening with both laptops even after client updates and reinstalls and even through an OS re-install.

 

It's been happening consistently ever since we moved up to Retrospect 6.0. I also back up lots of OS X desktops, OS X servers, Linux machines and Windows 2000/XP desktops. We don't have this problem with any other system, just these laptops. We have one XP laptop being backed up with the same Backup server setup and it works just fine after a reboot.

 

Does anyone have any light to shed on this subject? Or, is there a way I can script having the Retrospect client start up after a reboot on these machines?

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You don't need to script it; it's already been done.

 

There should ber a shell script named "retroclient" in the /Library/StartupItems/RetroClient/ folder.

 

That script should have the correct path to the location of the Retrospect Client.app bundle.

 

If the script isn't there, or if the path to the application has changed (such as from a user moving it to another folder) then the client process won't startup when the computer does.

 

 

Dave

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Dave,

 

Thanks for the pointer. The entire RetroClient folder does not exist on either laptop. We've tried uninstalling - rebooting - re-installing on both machines and it will not appear in any of them. All of the desktops have it however. We're going to try and manually create the folder on a machine and move the script from a desktop to a laptop and see what happens.

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The script is just text, so it dosn't matter where it comes from as long as the path is correct.

 

Do these machines have a /Library/StartupItems/ folder?

 

This folder is not part of a standard OS X instal, and is often created by the first installer that needs one.

 

It also represents a potential security flaw in OS X, since _any_ item inside can be executed upon boot. So permissions for this folder should not allow non-administrator users to have write access.

 

The correct permissions for /Llibrary/StartupItems should be:

drwxrwxr-x root:admin

 

The Retrospect Client installar will create this folder if it's not already there, and assign the correct permissions. But, if the folder is already there, the Retrospect Client won't modify its permissions (neither, by the way, will Apple's "Repair Permissions" routine).

 

You should look carefully at this; the installer's inability to write files to the folder is telling of something (of what, I don't know!).

 

Dave

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I was able to solve the problem by creating a RetroClient folder in the /Library/StartupItems folder and putting the RetroClient.bin and StartupParameters.plist files inside that folder. I got those files from a desktop machine running the same version of OS X.

 

At the command line I recreated the same permissions for the RetroClient folder and the enclosing files and then restarted the machines. Both times the client was running after restart.

 

Both laptops already had StartupItem folders and had other things in them that worked just fine. Uninstalling and re-installing the Retrospect client failed to have these items created. It only worked if I moved them manually.

 

Very weird.

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