Brian Cross

Q: What are "nsurlsessiond" and "AssetCacheLocatorService"?

Little Snitch is catching these processes trying to connect to various servers (and not Apple ones) at least once per hour. What are they? Should I just let them go?

OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)

Posted on Dec 16, 2014 8:12 AM

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Q: What are "nsurlsessiond" and "AssetCacheLocatorService"?

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  • by Linc Davis,

    Linc Davis Linc Davis Dec 16, 2014 1:37 PM in response to Brian Cross
    Level 10 (208,017 points)
    Applications
    Dec 16, 2014 1:37 PM in response to Brian Cross

    Those are built-in system processes. "Little Snitch" is doing its job of wasting your time with utterly pointless alerts and interfering with the normal operation of your computer.

  • by Brian Cross,

    Brian Cross Brian Cross Dec 16, 2014 1:41 PM in response to Linc Davis
    Level 1 (6 points)
    Dec 16, 2014 1:41 PM in response to Linc Davis

    Can you tell me exactly what those two processes are doing, and/or why they are connecting to non-Apple domains?

  • by Linc Davis,

    Linc Davis Linc Davis Dec 16, 2014 3:47 PM in response to Brian Cross
    Level 10 (208,017 points)
    Applications
    Dec 16, 2014 3:47 PM in response to Brian Cross

    No. They're undocumented. Ask the developer of "Little Snitch," who, unlike me, thinks you need that information.

  • by etresoft,

    etresoft etresoft Dec 16, 2014 6:32 PM in response to Brian Cross
    Level 7 (29,335 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 16, 2014 6:32 PM in response to Brian Cross

    Brian Cross wrote:

     

    Little Snitch is catching these processes trying to connect to various servers (and not Apple ones) at least once per hour. What are they? Should I just let them go?

    How do you know they aren't Apple? Apple never tells anyone what it does. Third party software developers like Little Snitch have to figure things out the hard way. nsurlsessiond is thought to be related to iCloud Drive. AssetCacheLocatorService is, as the name implies, some kind of caching service. The servers it connects to may or may not be Apple. It will be very difficult to find out for sure because Apple never tells. I suggest you just include these in Little Snitch's Apple whitelist.

  • by Brian Cross,

    Brian Cross Brian Cross Dec 17, 2014 5:25 AM in response to etresoft
    Level 1 (6 points)
    Dec 17, 2014 5:25 AM in response to etresoft

    I don't think they're Apple domains because they had very odd names, and some seemed to be ad servers.

  • by etresoft,

    etresoft etresoft Dec 17, 2014 6:06 AM in response to Brian Cross
    Level 7 (29,335 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 17, 2014 6:06 AM in response to Brian Cross

    What are those names? Apple does have a very big iAd delivery network. Perhaps Little Snitch knows what it is doing after all.

  • by Brian Cross,

    Brian Cross Brian Cross Dec 17, 2014 7:28 PM in response to etresoft
    Level 1 (6 points)
    Dec 17, 2014 7:28 PM in response to etresoft

    Some were random IP address that seemingly did not belong to Apple, and at least one other one was for akamai, I believe.

     

    Don't know if this is related, but the process "apsd" also tries to connect to akadns domains often.

  • by joshcali,

    joshcali joshcali Dec 18, 2014 12:27 AM in response to Brian Cross
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 18, 2014 12:27 AM in response to Brian Cross

    I had the same question.

     

    after doing some internet searching, it seems like nsurlsessiond may have to do with apple's iCloud backup.

     

    AND there are people complaining that it's severely draining their internet. I'm not using iCloud, so I deny it using little snitch, and I'm going to keep doing it until I have more info

  • by Brian Cross,

    Brian Cross Brian Cross Dec 18, 2014 5:26 AM in response to joshcali
    Level 1 (6 points)
    Dec 18, 2014 5:26 AM in response to joshcali

    I don't use iCloud, either. Hadn't heard about the "Internet drain," though. Perhaps I should just deny nsurlsessiond access as well.

  • by etresoft,

    etresoft etresoft Dec 18, 2014 6:03 AM in response to Brian Cross
    Level 7 (29,335 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 18, 2014 6:03 AM in response to Brian Cross

    Brian Cross wrote:

     

    I don't use iCloud, either. Hadn't heard about the "Internet drain," though. Perhaps I should just deny nsurlsessiond access as well.

    I'm not going to say your wrong about that or that you shouldn't do that. I'm not happy with most of Apple's new direction over the past couple of years. However, I do know how Apple works and using a 3rd party tool like Little Snitch to interfere is taking a risk. Apple is literally turning iCloud into the foundation of the OS. If iCloud is disabled, you could find yourself unable to login one day or all of your passwords could disappear. Who knows.

     

    So, if you do want to interfere, you need to be aware that you are hacking the OS and take precautions. If you have an opportunity to participate in a beta program, take it. Use old machines or VMs to test configurations. Be very cautious about any upgrade, no matter how small. Keep good backups. Time Machine is great and I'm a big fan of it. But if you are doing OS-level hacking like this, you may put Apple's Time Machine at risk too. So you will need a non-Apple backup instead of or in addition to Time Machine.

  • by Brian Cross,

    Brian Cross Brian Cross Dec 18, 2014 6:19 AM in response to etresoft
    Level 1 (6 points)
    Dec 18, 2014 6:19 AM in response to etresoft

    Fair point. This certainly deserves further study.

     

    Just out of curiosity...why would all of my passwords potentially disappear if I locked out iCloud? They're not stored there. (In fact, they're not even stored locally, at least not the only copy of them.)

  • by etresoft,Helpful

    etresoft etresoft Dec 18, 2014 7:19 AM in response to Brian Cross
    Level 7 (29,335 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 18, 2014 7:19 AM in response to Brian Cross

    Brian Cross wrote:

     

    why would all of my passwords potentially disappear if I locked out iCloud? They're not stored there. (In fact, they're not even stored locally, at least not the only copy of them.)

    I'm just violating the Apple Support Communities Terms of Use by speculating on what could happen in some future OS version.

     

    Traditionally, it was no big deal to expect problems if you hacked on an operating system in unusual ways. But then the internet happened and people started copying and pasting hacks they found posted on the internet without realizing the scope of the changes they were making. Now that is compounded by Apple's laser-like focus on "the average user" at the expense of us "non-average" users.

     

    For me, it is personal with iCloud. I have always used multiple partitions so I could keep multiple OS versions available for development and testing. That was never considered "hacking the OS" but it also wasn't quite "average user" behaviour either. I was very excited to get iCloud Keychain because I thought it would really make my life easier. It made my life much more difficult. I discovered that Apple no longer supports multiple boot partitions for some new features like iCloud Keychain. What other innocent habits do I have that Apple has deprecated?

     

    So, the moral of my little story is that none of us have any idea what Apple's vision of its future, ideal customer might look like. Woe unto us if we deviate from what Apple expects us to do.

  • by Brian Cross,

    Brian Cross Brian Cross Dec 18, 2014 7:29 AM in response to etresoft
    Level 1 (6 points)
    Dec 18, 2014 7:29 AM in response to etresoft

    Good point. Glad to know that avoiding iCloud Keychain from day one was a wise move.

     

    Thanks for the help!

  • by etresoft,

    etresoft etresoft Dec 18, 2014 7:41 AM in response to Brian Cross
    Level 7 (29,335 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 18, 2014 7:41 AM in response to Brian Cross

    I do use iCloud Keychain now, but I'm very careful about it. I don't use multiple boot partitions anymore. I use VMs for old OS versions now. I was very cautious about the upgrade to iCloud Drive in Yosemite. Of course, all of that causes me to miss some of the new developments in Yosemite. Regular people just can't keep up with Apple's update schedule anymore.

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