Please don't auto-launch on all Mac user accounts

Message boards : BOINC Manager : Please don't auto-launch on all Mac user accounts
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Rob Lewis

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Joined: 6 Feb 16
Posts: 3
United States
Message 87745 - Posted: 21 Aug 2018, 16:04:41 UTC

Repeat of earlier request: I am very close to kicking BOINC off my Mac because of the annoyance of having to remove it from login items on Mac user accounts every time an update is installed. How do you not see that it is rude and intrusive to add BOINC to every user account's login items? It should be opt-in, not opt-out!
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Profile Jord
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Joined: 29 Aug 05
Posts: 15480
Netherlands
Message 87749 - Posted: 21 Aug 2018, 17:22:16 UTC - in response to Message 87745.  

From Disabling auto-launch of BOINC Manager:
By default, BOINC Manager starts up automatically when each user logs in. You can override this behavior by removing the BOINC Manager Login Item for selected users, either via the Accounts System Preferences panel or by creating a nologinitems.txt file in the BOINC Data folder. This should be a plain text file containing a list of users to be excluded from auto-launch, one user name per line.

An easy way to create this file is to type the following in terminal, then edit the file to remove unwanted entries:

ls /Users > "/Library/Application Support/BOINC Data/nologinitems.txt"


After creating this file, run the installer. The installer will delete the Login Item for each user listed in the file. Entries which are not names of actual users are ignored (e.g., Shared, Deleted Users.)

You can also restrict who can actually run BOINC:
From Selecting which users may run BOINC Manager:
Due to new restrictions imposed by OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, there has been a change in BOINC's security implementation. Non-administrative users can no longer run BOINC Manager unless they are added to group boinc_master.

As of BOINC 6.10.5, the BOINC installer asks whether or not you wish to add all non-admin users to group boinc_master. (As before, the installer automatically adds all users with administrative privileges [i.e., users who are members of group admin] to group boinc_master.)

If you need more selective control over which users should be in group boinc_master, you can use the command-line tool AddRemoveUser.

To add user1, user2 and user3 to group boinc_master, enter the following in the Terminal application:

sudo {path} AddRemoveUser -a user1 user2 user3


where {path} is the path to the AddRemoveUser application. This also sets a login item for each specified user so that BOINC Manager will start automatically when that user logs in.

You can also use:

 sudo {path} AddRemoveUser -s user1 user2 user3

This is the same as the -a option and also sets BOINC as the screensaver for the specified users.

To remove user1, user2 and user3 from group boinc_master, enter the following in the Terminal application:

sudo {path} AddRemoveUser -r user1 user2 user3


This also removes the BOINCManager login item for each specified user. If any of the specified users had BOINC set as their screensaver, it will change their screensaver to Flurry.
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Message boards : BOINC Manager : Please don't auto-launch on all Mac user accounts

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