Tuesday, February 3, 2015

IDL 8.2: persistent com.exelis.lmgrd issue observed in Console

Quite a few months back, I opened up my MacBook Pro's Console app to investigate a sleep/hibernation issue I was having --- the first thing I noticed, however, was completely unrelated: the IDL license manager daemon (com.exelis.lmgrd) was desperately trying to run every 10 seconds.

If you're running IDL 8.2 on a Mac, you might be having a similar problem. To check, press command+<Space> to bring up the Spotlight Search, type in "Console", and press <Enter>. If this issue is occurring, you will see an annoyingly persistent string of messages in the Console that look like this:
[Date/Time Info] com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.exelis.lmgrd): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
This should be happening independent of running IDL, which is a major reason I suspected it was a bug in need of fixing. But I was busy and figured it wasn't a priority issue, so I left it for later...

If this was a dramatic post fueled with catastrophe, then at this point I'd tell you, "But I was wrong. It was extremely high priority and I should have fixed it while I still had the chance!!!"

But this is not a dramatic post. The issue is more like a zit than a cancer. It just annoyed me that it was happening and seemed like it needed to be addressed...so, without further ado -- The Solution!

The Exelis website addresses this issue very nicely. If you have an Exelis user account, then this page should help you just fine. I have not been able to get an Exelis user account for some reason (I've registered twice now to no avail), so that page was merely a gateway page for me --- a gateway to this page!

If you're like me --- free of an Exelis account --- or probably even if you have an account, just head to your Terminal and type:

sudo /bin/launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.exelis.lmgrd.plist

The page gives further advice, which I did not need to adhere to (but you might):
After issuing the "launchctl unload" command(s), reboot the system to halt any remnant "lmgrd" and "idl_lmgrd" processes.
And that should do it! I haven't seen the issue since, and it has been about a month.

Alternatively, you might just upgrade to IDL 8.4. But sometimes that's an issue (e.g., $$$).

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Extraneous information:
Launchctl is an interface to launchd, which manages processes and daemons running on your system. Launchctl allows you to load and unload jobs. See the man page launchctl to learn more about the unload option and -w flag.