Macintosh-Admin

Here was a new one for me. A Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server file server had been unresponsive to Apple Remote Desktop and wouldn’t display video for about a week. I could still SSH in and the AFP services it hosted were functioning normally, so I left it for a “later” project. Well, this morning I was notified that some of the AFP shares were no longer listed due to a power outage affecting the RAIDs connected to it.

No worries, restarting the AFP service or rebooting should resolve that. Only it didn’t. There was high usage by syslogd and I found tons of the following messages in /var/log/system.log:

Record of type dsRecTypeStandard:Config named ‘ServicesInformation’ already exists in /Local/Default. Trying with new name: ServicesInformation1

Others have run into this before, and it seems to be a corruption of /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/config/ServicesInformation.plist. In my case, there was some file system corruption, so I did the following:

1. Booted from another drive w/Disk Utility and SuperDuper!
2. Verified the disk using Disk Utility (which failed.)
3. Backed up the drive with SuperDuper! (Just in case.)
4. Repaired the volume with Disk Utility (successfully.)
5. Booted into Single User Mode.
6. Backed up /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/config/ServicesInformation.plist and removed all the extra ServicesInformation*.plist files.
7. Rebooted from the original boot drive.

What I found while fixing this:

• The ServicesInformation.plist was corrupted and contained text regarding a disk full error, so that’s likely the cause of the corruption.
• I was able to just delete ServicesInformation.plist and let it regenerate without detrimental effects, but be dubious.