Do you know any way to forcing restart an Mac OS computer from code? I tried an small applescript code without result. Applications ask for shutdown to the user so the user could stop the restarting procedure.
Regards
The official way is to send a system event to the login window process. Apple's Technical QA1134 even includes a code example.
It's an usual thing to want to force. If the user is willing to type in their password and are an administrator of the computer; perhaps you can run
sudo reboot
from your application.
Try using AppleScript/ScriptingBridge from your app to tell application "Finder" to restart.
Related
I have a launch daemon that will need to spawn a tray icon in a users session on OSX. My current problem is: is there a way to get an event whenever a user logs in or logs out? Similar to using logind or consolekit on linux.
The tool you want is a LaunchAgent. LaunchAgents are automatically launched when a user logs in, and shut down when the log out. If you also have a LaunchDaemon, you can use a LaunchAgent to communicate to it from the user context. See Creating Launch Daemons and Agents for full details and how to set it up. Make sure to look at XPC services as well (in the same doc) to understand one way to communicate between processes. You can also use loopback networking, but XPC is more powerful and preferred when appropriate.
If you're building this kind of thing, you definitely want to read the entire Daemons and Services Programming Guide and also TN2083: Daemons and Agents. That tech note is probably the most important document you'll read for this kind of problem. OS X is not like Linux (or BSD) in this regard.
A really simple but dragged me many days that I cannot figure out how:
I've setup synergy on my Mac as a client, using Ubuntu as the server.
But now I wanted to switch to use Mac as server and Ubuntu as client.
The question now I'm facing is that synergy settings page never show up, each time I try to open it, it just appears in less than 0.1 second, then it disappeared.
Because I've set it up already and I don't need the reconfigure the Ip addresses etc.
This is convenient.
But now I wanted to switch server/client roles, I need to reconfigure it, however the settings page of synergy never shows up to let me configure it, does anyone have the same issue?
I tried to uninstall synergy on my Mac, but when I reinstall it back, it automatically configures itself again and quickly disappears and runs in the background.
It's been a pain for me.
You can't start the Server on Yosemite, because you need to grant access to the process (Synergy) to control your computer:
http://mizage.com/help/accessibility.html
doing that with Synergy should work.
I'm writing a VB.NET application that I want to load at Windows start up before the user logs in. It's going to run on a server and launch other process and kill and restart them as needed to get around a memory leak issue. It also needs to have a GUI to view the current status of the processes its managing.
Now, I can get the application to load when the user logs in but that's not very helpful because the server could reboot for some reason and no user would be logged on, but this application still needs to run in the background.
How do I do this? Do I need to write it as a service, or is there another way? I tried writing a WinForms app but it wouldn't load until after the user logs in.
You need to write a service. Also, probably best to write a second app that will interact with the service and provide a GUI to control what it does.
I'm trying to write automated test, to ensure that the installer for my program works okay.
The program can be installed for all users (requires admin privs), or for current user (does not require admin privs). The program can also autoupdate itself, which in some cases requires admin privileges, and in some cases doesn't.
I'm looking for a way where I can have an automated test click "Yes, Allow" on the UAC dialogs, so I can write tests for all different scenarios, on many different operating systems, so that I can be confident when I make changes to the installer that I didn't break anything.
Obviously, the installer process itself cannot do this. However, I control the complete machine, and could easily start some sort of daemon process with administrative rights, that the testprogram could make a socket connection to, to request it to "please click ok on the UAC now".
I actually figured out how to do this while looking to answer a similar question about UAC. Here is what you can do:
Write a service that runs as SYSTEM.
Open the process token of the winlogon.exe instance running in your logon session.
Use that token to launch a helper process on the Winlogon desktop via CreateProcessAsUser.
At this point, you have a helper process running as SYSTEM in your logon session on the Winlogon (secure) desktop. From here you can use some kind of IPC mechanism to communicate from your automated test program to the helper process. In the helper process you can EnumDesktopWindows to find the UAC prompt. This is as far as I took it; I didn't actually try to simulate clicking Yes or No, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. Also, I only tested on Windows 7 32-bit; I believe the UAC architecture is identical to Vista, but I didn't test on it.
It took me a while to figure all this out; I can provide some code if you want.
EDIT: Just as a follow up I added code to use FindWindow() to find the "Yes" button and I was able to successfully send it a BM_CLICK message; the UAC prompt went away and the application was allowed to run.
An alternative solution might be to turn UAC off
The least bad solution I've found so far is to run the tests in a VMWare session, and control the mouse/keyboard trough the vmware sdk. Would love to hear about other solutions
Remote Desktop to it or run it as a guest VM (using Virtual PC or whatever, just don't boot to it.) This is also the best way to take a screenshot or video of the UAC prompt.
I've attempted just about everything to get our ClickOnce VB.NET app to run under Terminal Services as a RemoteApp. I have a batch file that runs the .application file for the app.
This works fine via RDP desktop session on the terminal server. As a TS RemoteApp, however, well... not so much.
I get a quick flash of command prompt (the batch file) on the client system and then... nothing...
Same goes for having it point to the .application file directly (without using a batch file) or even copying the publication locally and having it point to that.
I found a technet.microsoft.com discussion about a similar issue, but there's no resolution to it listed.
For anyone who has run into this before and got it working, what did you have to do?
We currently use RemoteApp's for everything else on that server, so I'm hoping to stick with that if possible.
The current workaround is to build and run an MSI-based installer for the app on our terminal server whenever we publish via OneClick out to the network, but this can be quite a pain at times and is easy to forget to do.
Since the app works fine via Terminal Services when run in full desktop mode but not during RemoteApp, I don't think it's anything specific to Terminal Server permissions so much as ClickOnce requiring something that isn't available when running as a RemoteApp.
The Key to getting it to work is to use Windows Explorer "C:\windows\explorer.exe". This process is the base process when you login to a full session.
If you setup the RemoteApp to use Windows Explorer and the command line argument of the path to the .application file for the ClickOnce application then it will work when launched as a remote application. Windows Explorer will flash for a second when it starts, but it will disappear then the ClickOnce application will launch.
Why does it have to be a ClickOnce application? I would consider just deploying the exe file and assemblies.
I know it only half a solution, but if the application does not change much, it might be a good solution.
I believe your problem is related to the fact that ClickOnce needs to store it's data in a special user folder called the ClickOnce application cache. Apparently because of how Terminal Services sets up user folders ClickOnce can't access this in TerminalServices mode.
See this link for more information.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/267k390a(VS.80).aspx
There may not be a way to do it :(
Can you launch the .exe directly? It's buried under your profile in \AppData\Local\Apps\2.0[obfuscated folders], but you should be able to find it.
That will skip the built-in update process, but if it can be launched that way you could then write code to do a manual update after the application starts.
Faced the same problem this morning and got it resolved by copying the clickonce app's directory from the user settings folder to somewhere like c:\MyApp\ - I know its nasty and not very ideal.. but good enough for me!
We recently ran across this issue and decided to post a bug report on this issue to the Visual Studio development team. Feel free to comment on the bug report. It has to be a bug in ClickOnce caused by some changes in Server 2008.
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/653362/net-clickonce-deployment-not-working-as-remoteapp-or-citrix-xenapp-on-server-2008-server-2008-r2
We also have a discussion on the MSDN forums covering this issue:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winformssetup/thread/7f41667d-287a-4157-be71-d408751358d9/#92a7e5d9-22b6-44ba-9346-ef87a3b85edc
Try using RegMon and FileMon when starting the app - You may be able to track it down to a file and/or registry permission issue.
Also maybe check the event logs to see if anything's getting logged when the process fails.