[launchd-dev] Penalty box property?

[Joe Auricchio]

That indicates there was a problem when launchd tried to spawn the job.
Likely, execing the main executable failed because of transient network problems; maybe the filesystem was temporarily unreachable and returned an IO error or ENOENT, or the script wasn't readable because credentials (kerberos tickets?) were unavailable.
launchd tries to use fsevents to watch for the executable coming back, but I'm not sure fsevents works well with network volumes.

(The other common cause of EX_CONFIG errors during spawn is using StdOutPath/StdErrPath, and the job runs as a non-root user, and the directory containing the stdout/stderr files doesn't exist. There's a known bug where it will be created as root and then be unwritable by the user the job runs as.)

> On Oct 26, 2016, at 10:11, Nick Zolotko <nzolotko at laika.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello All,
> 
> I have a launchd system service, that will stop running at seemingly odd times. The service just launches a bash script to rsync files over the network. However the launchd service will stop launching and gives me different error codes. However I can’t find any information on the launchd property of "penalty box”. Does anyone know what that does or means? When the service fails it always seems to have the state of spawning...
> 
> Stderr does not produce anything.
> 
> The script lives on the network and will run successfully most of the time. Once the launchd gets in this state it just fails unless I bootout/bootstrap the plist again.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> 
> Here is some more information.
> 
> root# launchctl print system/com.laika.localsync
> com.laika.localsync = {
> 	active count = 0
> 	path = /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.laika.localsync.plist
> 	state = spawning
> minimum runtime = 10
> 	exit timeout = 5
> 	nice = 20
> 	runs = 1
> 	successive crashes = 0
> 	excessive crashing = 0
> 	last exit code = 78: EX_CONFIG
> properties = {
> 	penalty box = 1
> }
> 
> root# launchctl list com.laika.localsync
> "LastExitStatus" = 19968;
> 
> Nick Zolotko
> Desktop System Administrator
> 
> 
> 
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