launchd recipe for vboxwebsrv doesn't work

[David Abrahams]

The example plist file for vboxwebsrv (on MacOS) declares the Socket on which it will be listening. That would be awesome for on-demand launching, except that it causes the socket to be held open for listening, and when vboxwebsrv is launched it finds that the address is already in use:

00:00:01.677 SQPmp #### SOAP FAULT: Address already in use [SOAP-ENV:Server]

and fails to do its job. I don't know how you're supposed to deal with this, but anyway...

Furthermore, if you try to use that plist file in /Library/LaunchDaemons, it won't work because vboxwebsrv doesn't work if some other service isn't already available. I'm not sure which service it depends on, but the launchdaemon can be started later. Apple doesn't provide any way of expressing this dependency, and suggests instead the two services should use IPC to negotiate things like this :-(

[David Abrahams]

if you try to use that plist file in /Library/LaunchDaemons

by that I meant if you set StartOnLoad to true so it starts unconditionally at boot.