Apple Bloatware
Today, I found a link to the Apple Broadband Tuner. The description doesn’t sound that bad, except for:
The system parameters are sysctl variables that are set as follows: net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131072 net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 358400 kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 512000
Wait? A 320 kB multipackage for 87 bytes of commands?
WOPR:/Volumes/Broadband Tuner/BroadbandTuner.mpkg/Contents/Packages/BroadbandTunerInstaller.pkg/Contents chris$ gzip -dc Archive.pax.gz | pax -v
drwxrwxr-t 3 root admin 0 Oct 24 20:28 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 0 Nov 14 2003 ./private
drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 0 Nov 14 2003 ./private/var
drwxrwxrwt 3 root wheel 0 Dec 16 2003 ./private/var/tmp
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 442 Nov 14 2003 ./private/var/tmp/BlankFile
pax: cpio vol 1, 5 files, 1493 bytes read, 0 bytes written.
The complete “magic” is in a perl script that is run after installation, Resources/postinstall:
@sysctl_commands = (
"kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=512000" ,
"net.inet.tcp.sendspace=131072" ,
"net.inet.tcp.recvspace=358400"
);
Not to mention that the installation of a pkg leaves traces in /Library/Receipts
Well, I think I can live without the Broadband Tuner…