Stop useless log entries from newer Adobe programs

Dec 16, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: rflorence

After installing and using some newer Adobe programs, like Photoshop CS4 or newer versions of Acrobat, you may notice a flood of messages in /var/log/system.log reading kernel: unknown SIGSEGV code 0. These are caused by a broken FLEXnet licensing server; Adobe knows about the problem and says it is "normal." There is a relatively simple way to fix it.

Save the following file in /Library/LaunchAgents as com.18james.killFNPL.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.18james.killFNPL</string>
    <key>Program</key>
    <string>/usr/sbin/killFNPL</string>
    <key>WatchPaths</key>
    <array>
        <string>/Library/Preferences/FLEXnet Publisher/FLEXnet/adobe_00080000_tsf.data</string>
    </array>
</dict>
</plist>
Then save the following script as /usr/sbin/killFNPL:
#! /bin/sh
# kills Adobe FNPLicensing Service to prevent log clutter
# ron@doofus, 14 Dec 2008

sleep 5
pid=`ps -axc | grep " FNPLicensingServ" | awk '{print $1}'`
[ $pid ] && kill $pid
exit 0
Finally, run these commands in Terminal:
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/sbin/killFNPL
$ cd /Library/LaunchAgents   
$ sudo launchctl load -w ./com.18james.killFNPL.plist
This works by setting launchd to watch a data file that the FlexNET licensing server modifies each time it authorizes the use of the Adobe product. When the file changes, it sends a sigterm signal to the licensing server. End of bogus error messages in the log and CPU load of the FlexNet licensing server.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20081214085717166