Thursday, March 22, 2007

Intego's Virus Barrier rewriting permissions?

Good Macintosh maintenance includes repairing disk permissions with Apple's disk utility software after installing or updating software, including system updates.

A few weeks ago I noticed that every time I repaired my ol' G5's disk permissions there seemed to be a set of permissions that needed to be repaired again and again: the activity monitor, keychain access, and ODBC administrator. Disk utility could repair the permissions, but the repair only lasted until the system re-booted.

I consulted with my #1 Mac tech support guru, a technical yahoo who admittedly dislikes anti-virus software. After examining the problem and the activity monitor, the guru suggested that we remove the Intego Virus Barrier x4 software and see what happens.

Once the latest version of Virus Barrier software was removed, the problem disappeared: the disk permissions stayed repaired.

I'd been using Intego's Virus Barrier x4 software for months without this or really any problem. It appears that after the latest (March '07) update, Virus Barrier x4 kept changing permissions in the root directory of my Mac.

Here's the disk utility disk permission repair report that kept returning until Virus Barrier x4 was removed:
Group differs on ./Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/Resources/pmTool, should be 80, group is 0
Owner and group corrected on ./Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/Resources/pmTool
Permissions corrected on ./Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/Resources/pmTool
Group differs on ./Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app/Contents/Resources/kcproxy, should be 80, group is 0
Owner and group corrected on ./Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app/Contents/Resources/kcproxy
Permissions corrected on ./Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app/Contents/Resources/kcproxy
Group differs on ./Applications/Utilities/ODBC Administrator.app/Contents/Resources/iodbcadmintool, should be 80, group is 0
Owner and group corrected on ./Applications/Utilities/ODBC Administrator.app/Contents/Resources/iodbcadmintool
Permissions corrected on ./Applications/Utilities/ODBC Administrator.app/Contents/Resources/iodbcadmintool

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