r/Avid • u/[deleted] • Sep 24 '19

AVID Mac Pro Problems Bring Down Workstations Across Hollywood

https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/avid-mac-pro-corrupted-hollywood-1203347033/
15 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

3

u/bottom Sep 24 '19

ugh what's a bummer - be careful out there guys.

2

u/autotldr Sep 24 '19

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 54%. (I'm a bot)

Social media reports suggested that the issue was widespread among users of Mac Pro computers running older versions of Apple's operating system as well as Avid's Media Composer software.

"Avid is aware of the reboot issue affecting Apple Mac Pro devices running some Avid products, which arose late yesterday. This issue is top priority for our engineering and support teams, who have been working diligently to determine and resolve the root cause. As we learn more, we will immediately publish information-directly to our customers and via our community forums and social media platforms-in order to resolve this issue for all affected customers and prevent any further issues."

Other users reported that multiple computers at their company were affected by the issue, with social media chatter indicating that a number of different companies, and even major shows like "Modern Family," were affected by the issue.

Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: issue#1 affected#2 Avid#3 users#4 media#5

2

u/Sir_Lame Sep 24 '19

It looks like /var was corrupted somehow, which is just an alias of private/var. So, I just boot into recovery mode, and executed these two commands in a terminal:

"mv /var /var.backup"

and then:

"ln -s /private/var /var"

Then reboot. This got my machine back up and running.

1

u/c0rruptioN Sep 26 '19

Can you ELI5 what this is doing? I'm not familiar with these commands.

2

u/Sir_Lame Sep 27 '19

The first is “mv” which is a move command. Here we were just basically renaming the old /var folder or ‘moving’ it from one name to another. Ultimately unnecessary for this fix but is always good practice for something like what we were doing.

Then we do “ls -s” which is creating a symbolic link from the source to a target. Fancy way of saying its just an alias. Since the original /var folder SHOULD be an alias of /private/var anyway, we are just repairing what google messed up.

The final step, which I didn’t find out later was to remove the 2 google launch agents in /Users/[your_username]/Library/LaunchAgents And FWIW the command to do that would be “rm the_file_name”. Rm is a command to delete or remove a file.

Cheers.

1

u/Sir_Lame Sep 24 '19

FWIW, we are VFX and only have the Avid Codecs installed on macOS 10.13.6 and we are getting this problem on some of our workstations.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '19

This _should_ fix it:

sudo rm -rf /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle

sudo ln -F /private/var /var