Sophos for Mac on-access scanning disabled.

The Problem seems to have fixed itself. I do not need help anymore.

While it may have fixed itself for the previous user, it hasn't for me. I've uninstalled and reinstalled Sophos. Still won't let me turn on access scanning. And it won't set any preferences I try. Says sophos failed to set preferences. There seems to be no way to turn off on access scanning. It says "on access scanning is turned off. The only button available is grayed out, but says "stop scanning". 

I can not turn on on-access scanning either.

I have reinstalled Sophos, deleted the preferences, Restored Defaults, none of which allowed me to turn on on-access scanning.

there is a red warning light saying "The on-acceess scanner is off" with Stop Scanning in gray.

Woould appreciate some assistance.

Chris

Under some circumstances a reboot is required to clear the kernel extension (our Remove program is only able to do so much to convince the kernel to give up its lock). This has helped some people who are running version 8.

I would recommend upgrading to version 9 (see the details on my post at the top of the page). It contains more defensive code to prevent getting into this situation.

My Sophos anti-virus also stopped working yesterday.  No one was using the computer at the time.  Scaning was disabled and I couldn't open the application.  I am currently uninstalling and will re-install.

Weird but I thought you'd like to know.  

Further to the above - upon re-installation, on-access scanning is still disabled.  I can access the application now and so I can scan all local drives and see what appears.   

It won't let me fully scan the drives now - crashes out of the scan half way through.  Some weirdness going on. 

The problem persists: I (foolishly) upgraded from v. 8 to v. 9.0.3. Version 8 was working fine, but the new version has never allowed me to turn on on-access scanning. Things I have tried that haven't worked:

Reboot about a zillion times

Delete all files having the form com.sophos....plist in /Library/Preferences (followed by reboot)

Delete IDE files and reinstall (and reboot)

Delete the Sophos AV installation, download a fresh copy of the zip file, and reinstall (followed by reboot)

Update Sophos AV, followed by reboot

The computer in question is a MacPro running OS 10.7.5.

It's frustrating (and annoying, since the window saying that Sophos isn't working tends to pop up and thumb its nose at me). I'd blow it off and try some other product, but my institution seems to think I need to run Sophos on my Macs. If I could pay for support I would...

Hi PJL_macuser,

Yes I understand your frustrations. I want to help.

A couple of things I'd like to have you run in the Terminal:

     kextstat | grep -i sophos

     sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions/

The first command will show what kernel extensions from Sophos are loaded and what is their status. The second command is supposed to happen automatically when the installer runs, however it might not be. This command is the Apple-recommended approach to trigger a refresh of the kernel extension metadata cache.

Note: the second command is invoked with sudo. It will prompt for your administrator password. The touch command has no harmful side effects, but you should always take care when running commands with sudo as you can do quite a bit of damage to your system.

You will need to reboot at this point. I would really like to hear if this works for you, we have been desperately looking for a system in this state, as we have been unable to reproduce this in our testing lab.

I'm on Version 8.0.18 and this just started happening for me today. I've tried the teminal commands and they did not work. I'm on Mac OS X 10.8.5.

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bobcook wrote:

Hi PJL_macuser,

Yes I understand your frustrations. I want to help.

A couple of things I'd like to have you run in the Terminal:

     kextstat | grep -i sophos

     sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions/

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I'll try reinstalling the latest version, but given what I've read from others I'm not too confident this will fix the issue.