[Buildbot-devel] OS X slave: could not lookup DNS configuration info service: (ipc/send) invalid destination port

[Greg Ward]

Hi all --

I'm adding a Mac build slave to our BuildBot setup.  The machine in
question is running OS X 10.6.3 (Snow Leopard) and BuildBot 0.7.9.
(I'm planning to upgrade it to 0.7.12 today, but haven't gotten around
to it yet.)

Problem: it appears that, after the BuildBot slave daemon has been
running for a while, builds start to fail.  The distinguishing
characteristic is this message in the build log:

  could not lookup DNS configuration info service: (ipc/send) invalid
destination port

followed by various other failures, some of which appear to have
nothing to do with DNS.  (E.g. the actual failure that seems to cause
the build process to ultimately exit with a non-zero status is from
xcodebuild being unable to load plugins.)

Google'ing turned up other people seeing this problem in PostgreSQL
and Apache -- also Unix-oriented daemon processes.  Hmmmm.  But it
didn't turn up any brilliant solutions.

My workaround so far is to restart the slave daemon and try the build
again.  Possibly related, from the PostgreSQL mailing list thread that
I turned up, is Apple's mDNSResponder daemon.  Restarting it without
restarting BuildBot had no effect.  Whether it's actually necessary to
restart mDNSResponder is unclear right now.

Oh yeah: I'm unable to reproduce this failure running builds manually
at the command line.  It only happens when a build is run by BuildBot
(daemon process, no controlling terminal, etc.).

Has anyone else seen this?

Thanks --

Greg