port over article http://brett.is/writing/about/pharos-popup-on-osx-lion/

contents/writing/about/pharos-popup-on-osx-lion/index.md

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+---
+title: Pharos Popup on OSX Lion
+author: Brett Langdon
+date: 2012-01-28
+template: article.jade
+---
+
+Fixing Pharos Popup app on OS X Lion.
+
+---
+
+My University uses
+<a href="http://www.pharos.com/" target="_blank">Pharos</a>
+print servers to manage a few printers on campus and we were running into an
+issue of the Pharos popup and notify applications not working properly with OSX
+Lion. As I work for the Apple technician on campus I was tasked with finding out
+why. The popup installation was setting up the applications to run on startup just
+fine, the postflight script was invoking the Popup.app, the drivers we were using
+worked perfectly when we mapped the printer by IP but what was going on? Through
+some further examination the two applications were in fact not being properly
+started either after install or on boot.
+
+I managed to find a work around that caused the applications to run. I manually
+ran each of them through command line (as through Finder resulted in failure) and
+magically they worked as expected and now whenever my machine starts up they start
+on boot without having to manually run them, even if I uninstall the applications
+and reinstall them I not longer have to manually run them… but why?
+
+```bash
+voltaire:~ brett$ open /Library/Application\ Support/Pharos/Popup.app
+voltaire:~ brett$ open /Library/Application\ Support/Pharos/Notify.app
+voltaire:~ brett$ ps aux | grep Pharos
+brett 600 0.0 0.1 655276 3984 ?? S 2:55PM 0:00.10 /Library/Application Support/Pharos/Popup.app/Contents/MacOS/Popup -psn_0_237626
+brett 543 0.0 0.1 655156 3652 ?? S 2:45PM 0:00.08 /Library/Application Support/Pharos/Notify.app/Contents/MacOS/Notify -psn_0_233529
+brett 608 0.0 0.0 2434892 436 s001 R+ 2:56PM 0:00.00 grep Pharos
+```
+
+I am still not 100% sure why this work around worked, especially when the
+postflight script included with the Popup package is set to run Popup.app after
+installation. The only explanation I can come up with is OSX keeps a library of
+all of the “trusted” applications, you know that popup that asks you if you want
+to run a program that was downloaded from the internet, and the Popup.app and
+Notify.app are not being properly added to the list, unless run manually.
+
+I am still looking into a solution that can be packaged with the Popup package and
+will post more information here when I find out more.