OS X superuser folders automatically created. Perusers launchd process appears to kill 501

Question

New Apple laptop OSX 10.8.2. I have used OS X but many years previously, and am not familiar with subtleties or changes in com.apple.launchd.peruser.x...

I have previously (and in retrospect, foolishly) made changes to these rapidly spawned new peruser accounts (my initial reaction was that if ipfw was disabled, then I might well be under hacker attack, which I have dealt with, years ago), but I believe I was wrong, and the results of my efforts at preserving the system's integrity have in fact been destructive, overreactive, and have resulted in much work to restore.

My understanding from other posts is that superuser protocols have changed quite dramatically since I bought the first developer version of OS X many years ago. Haven't developed on Apple much since then, w/ exception of WebObjects (IMO, much underrated at that time, and was more user friendly than ASP (prior to .NET, I vaguely recall).

Creation of apparently nasty peruser folders appear to confound 501 process, which logs inability to find firewall (ipfw). Can someone help me with this? I am concerned that either the system is improperly configured, an application was improperly installed (although there is little here beyond Apple's SDK, which I find quite accommodating and intuitive). Still, I am a novice, only sporadically develop at this time, and would really just like to see this system running happily.

Please offer assistance, in the form of potential info sources, or if you have had a similar experience, then perhaps scripts to suss out this issue. I do not wish to damage the system, but Apple's Developer connection and discussion threads do not appear to have dealt with this particular issue recently... Although I may well have missed something you have not - please apprise.

Any assistance on this issue is very much appreciated - by an old guy, who wants to do some things which were fun about 20 years ago.

Answer 1

Well, if I understand your question correctly, which I may not:

Superuser runs in the "Daemon" domain, where as your user 501 runs in the "Aqua" domain. The thing to remember is most of this OS is "per user", and if you

sudo su -

To get root, then you are seeing a different system than user 501.

You can see this by running

launchctl managername

as both root and your user. Root will be "System", as well as when you sudo with 501, but 501 alone will be "Aqua."

Easiest way to fix your changes, to go back to defaults, is to re-install either the 10.8.2 update, or re-install the OS. It'll leave your data alone, and clean up changes made to default settings.

To fix your user problem, create a new user, and delete the old one. New user will be default.

Hate to give the "re-install" advice, but that'll fix things quickest I think.

P.S. ipfw is deprecated pfctl is the new hotness for firewalling.