There is a known issue with running SHARP/autoSHARP on Mac's running Mac OS X Snow Leopard (other packages may also be affected). The problem is related to Apple's implementation of perl and as far as we can ascertain only affects machines on networks where password and account information for the user running the process is obtained via a network service such as LDAP. If you log in to a Snow Leopard machine and start the httpd job for the server in the background and log off, the job is highly likely to fail with a message "Perl: no user <uid>".

We suggest installing ActiveState perl and configuring the server to use that instead of the standard OS X perl. Not logging off after starting the httpd server will also stop the problem occurring, but this may not be a useful workaround for all users. We have diagnosed this problem on machines that use LDAP for authentication. It may also be a problem where NIS or NIS+ are used, but we have not investigated this.

To reconfigure the server to use eg. "/opt/bin/perl", do one of the following:

Use the installed administrative script:

% /bin/sh
% cd /where/sharp/is/installed
% . setup.sh
% ./adm/bin/host-setup
# specify "/opt/bin/perl" when asked about the location of perl

or

Change configuration files in bulk (if you have many machines)

% /bin/sh
% cd /where/sharp/is/installed/machines
% for q in $(find . -name host.setup); do
      cp -p $q ${q}.bck
      sed -e 's%/usr/bin/perl%/opt/bin/perl%g' ${q}.bck > ${q}
  done