Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Leopard and usbmuxd issues

Preface: This post to save the frustration of system.log files being filled up with error messages and an iPhone not being recognized by iTunes. It is of an extreme technical nature, and will be completely uninteresting to you.

If you are seeing messages in your console logs that look like:

You most likely have a corrupted group definition file. To confirm, type dseditgroup nobody. If there's no output, you have the same problem I had. Here's how to correct it:

1. Delete the file: sudo rm /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/groups/nobody.plist
2. Type: sudo dseditgroup -o create nobody
3. Edit /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/groups/nobody.plist and find where it defines the "gid". Change it from 500 to -2. (To match /etc/group).
4. Delete /var/db/dslocal/indices/Default/index
5. Reboot

Now, if you type "dseditgroup nobody", you should see a bunch of attributes, and your usbmuxd should load properly. And best of all, iTunes will see your iPhone!

Comments I have a similar problem but instead of getgrnam() I have getpwnam("_usbmuxd") every 10 seconds. I don't know MacOSX sysadmin too well. Any idea what the fix for my problem might be? - Dan Piponi, Monday, June 29, 2009 create a user called _usbmuxd from System Preference, and then create _usbmuxd group with dseditgroup - primo, Monday, July 13, 2009 Hey, I'm having a similar problem (iPhone not recognized) so I followed your instructions and created the user and the private/var/db/lockdown directory. Now I'm having permissions problems, I get: MobileDevice: store_dict_osx: Could not create /var/db/lockdown//97d0b58a558404c9b2de6b2d3d866d0750e1a7ea.plist: Permission denied And my iPhone won't show up in iTunes (though it does show in iPhoto) Any thoughts? - Matt, Sunday, July 26, 2009

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