The Watchdog bites back?

[missileboat]

I have been having a few issues trying to take ripstop and the TCOWatchdog offline. I have been largely successful thus far, enabled SSH, loaded a half a dozen codecs and in conjuction with ATVFiles, have been able to play WMVs on my ATV but when it comes to killing the watchdog, I am stymied. I was using the guide that the folks over at AwkwardTV made to disable it but my results were... interesting. I SSH into the device and typed:

 

mkdir /etc/mach_init.disabled

 

but I recieved a big 'Permission Denied' as a responce. I would have assumed that my drive was read only at that point but I was able to rule that out by loading and playing even more WMVs on my ATV, obviously the drive is read/write. I then decided to experiment by making a new folder in /Volumes/frontrow/ then using the mv command to move ripstop from mach_init.d, but again permission was denied. Curious, I decided to jump ahead and restart the device using:

 

shutdown -r now

 

to which I was told that I am 'NOT super-user.' Flustered, I tried to go ahead and unload the kext but promply recieved the reply that I 'must be root to unload kexts.'

 

For what it is worth, I was able to ps auxww and kill the ripstop process manually but as soon as I cycle power to the device, it will come back. Has anyone else experienced this? I was under the impression that after I logged in via SSH using the frontrow username and password and setting the drive to read/write I would be able to manipulate root. It seems however, that this is not the case. Am I unique in this issue or am I missing something painfully obvious?

[Ictinike]

Welcome to Insanelymac! :-)

Sorry, I can't really help you on your problem though. :-(

Did you set the drive to read/write for the right usergroup?

[missileboat]

I believe so, though I wouldn't know how to change the user group through Terminal. I can only assume that it is since I can read and write to everything else, just not that directory. Is there, perhaps a different login for root??? To date, I have been logging into frontrow@AppleTV.local and frontrow@192.168... etc but niether makes a different (though I never really expected it to).

[sigxcpu]

did you try to execute commands with sudo and type the password that you used for login?

[yod9999]

as well as ensuring that the file system is mounted in read/write mode, you need to prefix some of the commands with sudo, e.g.

 

sudo mkdir /etc/mach_init.disabled

 

this will ask for a password, use frontrow again

 

interesting, even though i've followed the guide i still can't fully disable the watchdog. the only way i can prevent the finder restarting is to rename Finder.app so the watchdog can't find it

[Andrmgic]

yeah, you'll need to run

 

sudo mount -uw /dev/disk0s3

 

before you can make any changes to the boot drive where the kernel and watchdog reside.

 

You can take the watchdog kext out of the Extensions directory as well after unloading it. Do that, kill ripstop, copy over TCOWatchdog to /etc/mach_init.disabled

 

and reboot. Now you should be able to rename the finder and run other apps without your apple tv rebooting in diagnostic mode on you

 

I created shell scripts for killing the finder process and renaming the application, as well as for naming it back and running it again and aliased them to killfinder and resfinder

 

Makes it easy for me to get it out of my way to use system preferences and other applications and easy to put it back when I'm done

[missileboat]

Do you ever have times when you suddenly realize something that completely solves a puzzle you have been pondering for days but then in the next half second you fell REALLY dumb for not realizing it sooner... I wasn't using sudo to execute the commands.

 

Thanks folks! You have set me back on course!