… decide that deleting the “Groups” subtree from your LDAP server and reloading it from a new import is a good thing after you’ve moved it into production.

After burning myself very badly by thinking that such an operation would be okay, the new philosophy is that any change that needs to be made which affects more than one object in the directory shall be made programmatically, so that it can be checked thoroughly for errors before being let loose.

Sadly, some things can only be learned through pain.

Well, as it turns out it was indeed Little Snitch’s handy “automatically deny after 60 seconds” setting that was keeping me from seeing what was going on with dashboardadvisoryd. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the window that popped up for me. As you can see, it’s parent PID is 1, which is launchd, so it really is a periodic service fired off by launchd.

I’ve now added a permanent Deny rule to Little Snitch for this, as I don’t really approve of this check-in procedure by Apple to verify the widgets I’ve installed. Of course, now I really want to get a license of Little Snitch for my wife’s iBook…

I’ve been reading with some interest all the discussion online regarding Apple’s secret thrice-daily checkup with the mothership to determine if your Dashboard widgets match what Apple has published on it’s own site. I think a good part of this was kicked off by the “Apple Phones Home, Too” article on Daniel Jalkut’s Red Sweater Blog. At least, I’ve only noticed the other blog posts swirling around the ‘Net after reading his.

I am, however, a little confused, as I run a number of widgets on my Dashboard, but I find no running “dashboardadvisoryd” process running. I, too, run Little Snitch to try to keep an eye on what my computer is doing on the network, and I have not yet been asked what to do about “dashboardadvisoryd”. I even went so far as to explicitly delete all the rules in Little Snitch for the Dock, in case this “phone home” thing was running under the Dock’s name, but still, nothing.

Feeling left out, I decided to see if I really had updated my system. Yup, Software Update says I’m up to date, and About This Mac tells me I’m at 10.4.7. Okay, so this mystical daemon must be on the system somewhere. Dropping to a terminal window (I tend to prefer iTerm over Terminal), I broke out the trusty find command, which told me that yes, indeed, the daemon exists on my system. The only two files with “dashboardadvisoryd” in their names were:

/private/etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist
/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/dashboardadvisoryd

So, does that mean my system is not phoning home to the Apple Mothership, or does this thing only run periodically (say, from cron or launchd?) Nobody I’ve read yet has really specified how it runs. Anyone know? Or has Apple disabled this in something else I installed via Software Update? (Yes, unlikely, I know.) I suppose one final option is that Little Snitch has been asking me about it, but I’ve not been around to answer it, so it happily defaults to denying the connection. Couldn’t find anything in the system logs from Little Snitch, so I’m not sure about this last theory.

UPDATE: Yes, I had Little Snitch set to automatically deny any connection request after 60 seconds. I’ve disabled this for now to see if I can catch this little daemon in the act.