openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Gateway crashes ~18s after startup due to bonjour name conflict with other local services [1 comments, 2 participants]

Bug Description

Gateway starts successfully but crashes after ~18 seconds with unhandled_rejection, entering crashloop. The root cause is a bonjour/mDNS name conflict between the OpenClaw gateway and other local services registered as LaunchAgents on the same machine.

Environment

• Hardware: Mac mini (Apple Silicon arm64)
• OS: Darwin 24.14.0
• OpenClaw version: 2026.4.24 (cbcfdf6)

Symptoms

• Gateway probe reports: timeout / ECONNRESET / gateway closed (1006)
• stability bundle shows events=[] count=0 — crash stack trace is not captured by the stability bundle
• Crashloop: gateway restarts, runs ~18s, crashes again

Root Cause

Three local LaunchAgent plists with RunAtLoad=true register bonjour services that collide with the gateways bonjour name:

1. com.zj.cloudflared-zjaios-ai
2. com.zj.real-estate-os-server
3. com.zjaios.frontend5173

The bonjour name conflict causes the gateway to crash rather than gracefully adopting a different name.

Temporary Fix

# Boot out conflicting services
launchctl bootout gui/$UID/com.zj.cloudflared-zjaios-ai
launchctl bootout gui/$UID/com.zj.real-estate-os-server
launchctl bootout gui/$UID/com.zjaios.frontend5173

# Reinstall gateway
openclaw gateway install --force

After this, probe: ok is restored. However, the conflicting plists have RunAtLoad=true, so the crash will recur after reboot.

Suggested Fixes (from the field)

1. Bonjour auto-rename on conflict: When gateway detects a bonjour name collision, it should auto-append a suffix or fall back to a unique name (Apple DNSSD supports this pattern natively).

2. Stability bundle should capture unhandled_rejection stack traces: Currently events=[] count=0 even when the crash is an unhandled promise rejection. The full stack needs to be written before exit.

3. Bonjour pre-flight check on gateway startup: Before registering its bonjour service, the gateway should check for existing registrations with the same name and emit a clear, friendly warning explaining the conflict — rather than crashing silently 18 seconds later.