With Mac OS X 10.5.8 and 10.6.x, Mac OS X Server, Xsan, Final Cut Server and a number of other serialized products were switched to a whole new solution for managing serial numbers: a newly redone serialnumberd. If you run otool against serialnumberd in 10.5.7 and below you’ll notice no dependencies; it stood alone so to speak. If you run otool against the latest and greatest then you’ll notice that it has a number of dependencies that run the gambit of otherwise unthinkable services. This caused minor growing pains during the summer with multihomed network connections, maximum number of clients and other aspects of servers with certain solutions, but that…
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Mac OS X: SystemStarter
Ever wonder why those things you put into /System/Library/StartupItems and /Library/StartupItems start automatically? SystemStarter. System starter automatically starts up items stored in /Library/StartupItems and /System/Library/StartupItems. As Mac OS X continues to transition much of the previous functionality of other facilities such as the cron daemon into launchd, development has also reduced the reliance on SystemStarter since Mac OS X 10.3. However, many third-party applications do still use StartupItems, Apple development prefers the launchd facility and will continue to rely more heavily on it in 10.6 and beyond.