I'm trying to write a libcurl wrapper using the NSURL* interfaces. (Why? Because we're running into some problems with libcurl and I'd rather not rewrite all of the C++ code, so I thought I'd try wrapping a subset around NSURLSession et al.) One of the things we want to get is the IP address of the remote side (for both GET and POST). I can possibly live without this, but it's very useful for debug and performance information.

xctrace --template Leaks identified this as a leak:         NSString *uuid = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:connectionID];         NSData *contentData = [NSData dataWithBytes:data length:length];         id<ConnexctionProtocol> proxy = [connection asyncConnectionProxy];         [proxy handleData:uuid data:contentData]; return; (Which is to say: a few thousand objects show up in the Leaks pane, the stack for them goes up to the NSData creation, and Leaks apparently thinks it's never released.) That doesn't look like it should be a leak, with ARC? Which probably means I'm doing something wrong?

I couldn't find anything too recent, but everything seems to say that no, asl_search-like APIs are non-existent for os_log. And the source code for log isn't available so I can't see how it does it...

I don't know how to go forward on this one: we have a test engineer who can, reliably, cause networking to simply stop working. Our app has 3 major components -- a proxy daemon, a containing UI app, and a network extension. Because I am lousy at using debuggers, the extension logs every single new flow it gets (to .debug), as well as a bunch more. When our engineer gets this problem, the proxy may crash a couple of times, but is still running; the extension is also still running, but no longer gets new flows. Networking outside the machine no longer works. But doing echo foo | nc 127.0.0.1 88 succeeds (or, at least, doesn't print any error -- and also doesn't get any log messages from the extension). I've got a sysdiagnose from it, as well as a bunch of logs, and all I can really see is that the proxy app restarted, and when it came back, it said there was no networking available. And that the extension stopped logging new flows at about the same time. I have not been able to reproduce this -- even though our engineer is using the same script I wrote to try to reproduce it, and he can, within an hour. (As opposed to my systems, which have been running for almost a day on both an M1 and Intel system.) Any ideas of things I should try looking for in the sysdiagnose?

Yes, actual process ID: on upgrades, our network extension sometimes decides to become completely incommunicado as far as XPC is concerned -- any attempt to send an XPC message to it results in "couldn't communicate with a helper application" or similar. The only workaround I've been able to come up with is unloading and reloading the extension. It was suggested that I try killing it. Which, great, but... how would I get it's pid? I do not at all feel comfortable launching pkill; I could get all the processes on the system and look for the name. But is there a way for the wrapping process to be able to get the pid?

We started discussing how we'll deal with captive portals, and I realized I don't know if CNA results in network change events. Does it? (I don't have a captive network here, and lockdown makes it hard to go find one, and making one would be ... quite a bit of work.)

We have a network extension. It is bundled in an app, that is launched as a launch agent for each user. When doing the install, the installer bootstraps the agent for each currently-logged-in console user. When the agent runs, it checks to see if it is the current active console user, and if so, goes through the process of activating the extension. This part works fine. But... if the installation is done while two users [haven't tried more than 2, sorry] are simultaneously logged in, SysPrefs gets launched for both users. Is this expected behaviour?

consoleUser = SCDynamicstoreCopyConsoleUser(NULL, &uid, &gid); the string is empty, but not NULL. uid and gid are set properly. Any idea why this would happen? NB: it only happens from a LaunchAgent, for some reason; if I isolate the code in question, and run it via CLI, it works exactly as expected. And it only seems to happen for one person -- but for him, it happens on both Intel and Apple Silicon.

I had this a happen a long time ago, and I suspect that was due to the object not releasing due to its own retained objects. But now it's happening again. Now, I know this happening because I logged the address of the object, and there are different values alternating in the log. So my questions really are: How can I prevent this? How can I detect this?

We have a containing app for our network extension; it's set up as a faceless app and run as a LaunchAgent. It works rather well, we're happy with it. Except sometimes, possibly only on M1's, on reboot, it'll show up twice. Our name in the plist is com.kithrup.appName -- simple enough. On reboot, launchctl list shows two com.kithrup jobs -- and the extra one is application.com.kithrup.appName.3238445.3238450. Anyone have any idea about this?

This is somewhat to my question at On reboot, two instances of faceless app - but slightly different focus. This is my understanding of how the system works, and please correct me if I'm wrong: A network extension can only be loaded by an application That application must contain the extension (in Contents/Library/SystemExtensions) Only the application instance that loads an extension can get VPN notifications (eg, NEVPNStatusDidChangeNotification) There does not appear to be a way to get the version of installed network extensions programmatically? When a second user logs in, and runs the containing app, and requests loading the extension, it does the normal replacement request. Given that... how is it supposed to handle multiple users (via Fast User Switching)?

Specifically, it doesn't find anything. (Now, this isn't a huge deal, I was just playing with some queries related to another issue I had, and found that I couldn't search that way.) Is this expected? eg, mdfind 'kMDItemFSName == "/"' finds nothing.

Is there a way to get a notification of some type when a new application is installed? The specifics here have to do with "Here is a list of applications we want to monitor"; I use mdquery to find them (so I can get the paths, and information from the bundle). However, if it's not installed yet, then I can't do that. But if it gets installed later, I'd like to.

We'd prefer our security application not be worked around by the complex task of typing sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/foo.plist 😄. Is there a way to prevent that? (We're not using ServiceManagement because we need ot control some of the plist entries, sadly.)

Our transparent proxy provider sends flows to a daemon which analyzes and then does proxying. Works fine. Except that sometimes it stops working. As far as I can tell, it's due to DNS not working. Queries hang -- we've got some internal ones we log, that have timed out after 20 or 30 seconds. Now, clearly, we're doing something bad (because if we kill the daemon and it restarts, everything goes back to working). Unfortunately, I have forgotten so much I can't figure out how to see where it's broken! Things like dig @8.8.8.8 com. any fail -- I am presuming because it's trying to do a lookup of "8.8.8.8" and that fails, but I could be wrong. Admittedly, that one doesn't time out, it simply says no servers could be reached. Meanwhile, pinging that address works. (And, also, the local DNS host -- the one provided via DHCP and listed in /etc/resolv.conf and ipconfig getstatus -- behaves the same way.) I haven't been able to reproduce this myself, unfortunately. Although I have, somewhat interestingly, had a similar issue, which was clearly due to a Google Home WiFi access point (as resetting it fixed the problem, as does moving to another area of the house such that a different AP in the mesh takes over). On my FreeBSD systems, I'd run tcpdump and truss/ktrace on named, but as I said, I've forgotten so much about how macOS does DNS I'm flailing. Help?