Automating FAH on macOS Mojave

[earthsaver]

I was having some trouble with the FAH client on macOS Mojave and was grateful to discover 7.5.1. However, I have been using crontab entries to play, pause, and finish folding at specific times, and these scripts have not been working reliably since installing 7.5.1. They were working fine on the older version I had installed before, even since upgrading to Mojave.

Anyone have an idea what I might need to do to get everyone playing nice again?

Thanks!

[bruce]

I don't know about MacOS, but in Linux, FAHClinet is designed to run continuously as a service in its own ID. FAHControl is designed to manage the jobs that the daemon processes. This management can also be done by sending telnet-like messages to FAHClient. (If you wish to suspend printing, you generally don't do it by forcing the print service to stop ... you send it a command to pause one or more printers.)

The key commands that can be sent to FAHClient are PAUSE and FINISH. They can be applied independently to each slot ... or to all slots.

Personally, I don't use crontab to issue those commands. I do know that the crontab script was rewritten recently and probably not tested thoroughly, i.e.- Start and Stop probably work.) If you want to report a problem with that script, please give us enough information that the problem can be reproduced.

[Joe_H]

FAHClient runs as a background daemon on macOS just like Linux. However, Apple has been changing and tightening security domains for such processes in recent versions of the OS. I have seen the effect of this with some systems at work that were recently upgraded to High Sierra for other software. I have not yet looked at Mojave, but I understand it introduces some additional security.

In older versions of the OS crontab is listed as supported, but use of it is deprecated in favor of launchctl. I would need to read the recent developer notes and man pages for Mojave to see what limitations may have been added to use of crontab, but suspect that may be part of the issues you are seeing.

[earthsaver]

Thanks for your insights so far. However, I didn't have a problem with my crontab-triggered scripts working in Mojave before I updated FAH to 7.5.1. I think I was running 7.4.4 before and while FAHControl was a little finicky, the client worked fine.

I suppose I can try downgrading and see if I can validate this claim, and go from there.

[earthsaver]

Well, that didn't work. Oh well. I await someone who's used Mojave to hopefully show up and share some thoughts about how to automate FAHClient on a chosen schedule. Thanks!

[bruce]

Did you fully uninstall 7.5.1?

There's a special script to uninstall FAH from OS-X but (as I suggested above) I've never used it, nor to I know if it works on Mojave. My concern relates to the FAHClient script which is in the crontab directory. If you're still running the one that was installed by 7.5.1, you'll want to take the necessary steps to reinstall the one installed by 7.4.4.
(Of course this is a guess... so if I'm wrong, I'm sorry.)

[earthsaver]

I wasn’t aware that there was a FAHClient script in the crontab directory. Can you say more about that?

I did fully uninstall 7.5.1 before reinstalling it. Only via a proper installation was I able to trigger it to run on startup.