Keeping an Eye on Leopard

It has been a couple of years since the Hyperic development team decided to adopt Macs and OS X as our standard development environment, probably around the time when my Toshiba Windows XP laptop was threatening to spiral itself into oblivion for the second time in as many years. Eventually, I paid a second $600+ repair bill to get it rescued, but knew its days were numbered. We already had a couple of developers who worked on their Powerbooks without issues for a good number of problem free years, and the release of Intel based Macbook Pros was just the impetus we needed for the whole team to move to the Mac platform for our development.

It was definitely a welcomed change. These machines were beefy enough for us to actually compile and run on the laptops, while running a host of other applications for daily use. I probably saved enough time in not having to search and hunt for a document, application, or email (hello, Quicksilver anyone?) to fix an extra bug or two per day just for our loyal users. In fact, the original support for Intel-based Macs for Hyperic HQ came from building on one of the Macbook Pros.

While we were extremely satisfied with our productivity improvement, we began to find areas of complaint as we became more familiar with OS X. So when Apple released Leopard, just two weeks ago, several of us at Hyperic gleefully upgraded our systems right away in anticipation of Apple removing those last remaining grumblings on an otherwise satisfied experience with their products.

Well, you know what they say about best laid plans. There were snags right off the bat. One of the machines suffered the Blue Screen of Death. Once Leopard booted up, the first question was, “What have they done with the Dock (gratuitous transparency and does anyone know why there is a crosswalk)?” Then the list of incompatible applications began to emerge: Parallels 2.5, GroupCal, Fireworks 8, Growl Mail notification, etc. We knew that Java 5 was questionable on Leopard, and Eclipse (Europa) was certainly proof of that, requiring several force kills a day. Okay, so these are annoyances and nothing one couldn’t live without. However, Mail was the big one. On Tiger, Mail was painfully slow and unreliable, especially with Exchange. However, Mail on Leopard is even worse than Tiger, if that is possible. I suppose the implementation of HTML stationary outweighed stability for the Apple developers. We began to get duplicated email messages, Mail process would hang, rules don’t always apply, and sometimes emails simply would not be received for several hours. This is obviously a huge impact to our productivity.

However, there are bright spots: Spaces, Time Machine, and … Hyperic HQ! Yup, HQ server and agent both worked without modification. It detected the O/S and version correctly.

In fact, SIGAR appears to function even better with Leopard than with Tiger. With Tiger, there were issues with auto-discovery and platform services due to long execution paths and permissions. In order for the agent process to communicate with other application processes, you had to set the security policy for all accounts, even if you had an administrator account.

sudo sysctl -w kern.tfp.policy=1

These issues appear to have been resolved with Leopard. I can easily create a process service to monitor any arbitrary application or process, such as Mail.

All of my applications get properly discovered and automatically imported into my inventory. So now, I can properly monitor my Mail application when it decides to quit on me.

Even though I can’t prevent Mail from dying, at least I can now be notified of it.

All in all, the transition to Leopard has been worthwhile. And for all those early adopters of Leopard out there, rest assured, Hyperic HQ will continue to keep an eye on your infrastructure for you.

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