[Mono-osx] Active Directory Infinite Loop

[Eoin Norris]

> I'm not sure it is as rare as you think.  While I would agree that  
> it would be very rare for a home user to use active directory  
> (though I know a couple who do), among institutional users  
> (schools, colleges, companies, government, etc), it would be  
> unusual not to use active directory, and I would be surprised if  
> these users didn't constitute at least 15% of the install base, and  
> probably more than that.
>

Well, my application is generally home-based but I would kinda think  
15% of all users high, though it may be 15% of all macs deployed  
across  "schools, colleges, companies, government" but whatever about  
schools macs in the enterprise are extremely rare. So the total of  
all macs is lower.

> Do you know if this is only an issue for development or would it be  
> an issue for deploying Mono applications to machines with AD  
> accounts?  Do you know where in the Mono runtime this failure is  
> occurring, I wouldn't mind having one of our engineers poke around  
> if you might have some idea where to start looking.

It is an issue for deployment as well. I am getting reports in the  
field. I dont know specifically where to look in the Mono code  
( where it is happening) but the thread below ( taken from this list)  
gives some examples. The original poster does not seem to be on the  
list anymore, or not contributing to this new thread on the same  
issue, but might be available on that email address.

http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-osx/2006-January/000444.html


He clearly did some research and ascertained that it was an Apple bug.

"  The initial call to semget succeeds, but the IPC_RMID call
to semctl fails with an Operation not permitted error, at which point
every subsequent call to semget will fail."

He thinks that the problem is with the large user_ids on Active  
Directory accounts, however that would indicate that all calls to  
semctl would fail on OS X AD accounts which must have raised some  
issues in Apple, besides the mono issue. It may be on their radar  
( to pun).

Also I wonder if OS X mono needs to even do this wapi semaphore read?  
it would be nice to solve this problem, yes.

-- Eoin