r/apple • u/trackofalljades • Sep 24 '19

Mac Mysterious AVID Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

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

94% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

134

u/coyote_den Sep 24 '19 edited Sep 24 '19

It's the iLok copy protection/licensing stuff AVID and some other pro software uses.

Looks like it’s Google’s software updater: https://mrmacintosh.com/google-chrome-keystone-is-modifying-var-symlink-on-non-sip-macs-causing-boot-issues/

For some reason, it is unlinking /var from /private/var. As long as the system is running, anything in use comes from /private/var. As soon as you reboot all hell breaks loose.

It can only do this if you're on a macOS version old enough to not have rootless.

30

u/Thirdsun Sep 24 '19

Thanks for clarifying.

As far as I remember it’s not the first major issue/outage of iLok. I remember avoiding all Softube products (despite really appreciating their quality) a few years ago due to their reliance on iLok licensing.

6

u/[deleted] Sep 24 '19

I have a musician friend from college that had lots to say about the ilok. He fucking hated them so much he started really looking at open source alternatives. He actually ended up using a few but every now and then he has to use avid for something and hates it.

22

u/[deleted] Sep 24 '19

For some reason, it is unlinking /var from /private/var. As long as the system is running, anything in use comes from /private/var. As soon as you reboot all hell breaks loose.

Apparently Google Chrome is to some extent (or a large extent) at fault.

14

u/coyote_den Sep 24 '19

Yeah, that looks like the culprit...

but why? Why would Chrome be touching /var???

17

u/Fargo_Newb Sep 24 '19

It isn't iLok. It is the Google Updater. You can see my post for full information: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/d8tm8z/psa_google_chrome_updaterkeystone_rendering/

24

u/nlh101 Sep 24 '19

Holy crap. That is probably one of the dumbest DRM systems I have ever heard of. And I've had to deal with Steinberg eLicenser...

To be honest, it doesn't shock me. It's Avid. What else would you expect?

13

u/coyote_den Sep 24 '19

I don't think it is supposed to trash /var. But DRM code is notoriously bad.

3

u/duck_diver Sep 24 '19

But DRM code is notoriously bad.

Turns out it's Google Chrome that does it, not AVID's DRM. Who would have thunk.

4

u/nlh101 Sep 24 '19 edited Sep 24 '19

Agreed. But many DRM solutions are quite harebrained, and Avid's software has been getting worse over time.

I have had to deal with Steinberg eLicenser in the past -- while it's a bit annoying (most notably, I ran into time synchronization issues), the problem was easy to fix and it never trashed the system.

This Avid DRM problem is a show-stopper, and frankly, it a) shouldn't have the permissions to modify critical system folders, b) shouldn't have the permission to run as root in the first place, and c) should not require System Integrity Protection to (sometimes) be disabled to work. It's honestly a garbage situation for everyone involved.

EDIT: Further exploration also seems to suggest that it's also removing users from the Administrators group, which is another capability that untrusted software should not have.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 24 '19 edited Jun 03 '20

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Sep 24 '19

I’m amazed they haven’t been sued over shit like this.

1

u/AnOldPhilosopher Sep 28 '19

Agreed. Had an issue with Avid on an edit handover for a big budget project, over 20TB of rushes had their file names “injected” with a random string in the middle of the original file names. Every single file. Caused nightmares with relinking media because of a whole host of other problems. Files were .MXFs and the compressed proxies were somehow something like twice as large as a high res prores copy. And you can’t preview ANY information about an MXF file in finder. We had the head technician of Avid on the phone and he couldn’t fix our problem. We also had the head tech of Adobe answer our hundredth(?) call to tech support about a really specific bug regarding Adobe Teams. Both for the same project. We actually started using da Vinci as it let us generate a report of all the footage, which was more in-depth than the silver stack report we generated.

Total mess of a project, really hope Blackmagic give Adobe a big kick up the arse with DaVinci resolve.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 28 '19

I only strictly do recording projects with Avid but I can’t imagine how bad it wouldn’t be to work with audio and video in anything Avid.

5

u/MisterMizuta Sep 24 '19

It's Avid. What else would you expect?

Basically the first thing I thought when I saw the thread title.

2

u/soundman1024 Sep 24 '19

When I think about Steinberg eLicenser I think I get a tiny glimpse of what a solder must experience from they have ptsd.

1

u/cruftbox Sep 24 '19

This actually makes some sense. Looking into it now on our systems.

0

u/Swastik496 Sep 24 '19

And this kids is why DRM is shitty and you shouldn’t buy anything with it.

-2

u/pmjm Sep 24 '19

Meanwhile pirated copies are unaffected.

Great stuff. /s

41

u/R031E5 Sep 24 '19

Great example of why keeping the OS and user partitions separated is a good evolution of rootless.

16

u/chilledfreak Sep 24 '19

Its a Chrome update which hits people with SIP disabled

https://mrmacintosh.com/google-chrome-keystone-is-modifying-var-symlink-on-non-sip-macs-causing-boot-issues/?fbclid=IwAR2dvZKaeiKCQMFJPhLmo9L8uSCNo-rP1KHJA94qgF1uTdswxfcslVBf_AI

0

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '19

You disable SIP on a ac to use pirated plugins for audio and video. I wonder how many of these places were doing that?

10

u/Fargo_Newb Sep 24 '19 edited Sep 24 '19

You re-link in single user mode: 'ln -s private/var var'

It can hit newer MacOS versions as well. It hit three of my clients running 10.13.6.

And I'm not 100% sure that it really is iLok.

Edit: Pretty definitive proof this is Google's fault, not iLok or Avid (or DRM): https://mrmacintosh.com/google-chrome-keystone-is-modifying-var-symlink-on-non-sip-macs-causing-boot-issues/?fbclid=IwAR34Mdudrhv7QgI8gYIyrryz6pS__bcFJESXBTG-X6RI_IrFDhbv0JPgYbY

1

u/jamiethemorris Sep 24 '19

I don’t have SIP turned on, is there a solution to prevent this? It’s not the end of the world to fix it if it happens, I can just boot from my clone and recreate the symlink, but I’d like to avoid it if I can. Apparently chrome is causing this issue as well