File Share Encryption

We have just purchased PGP WDE and one of our users has an issue with his MacBook Air.

What has been reported is that when the air goes to sleep for a couple of hours it will wake up fine.  When the user leaves the MBA overnight it will refuse to wake up in the morning and he has to do a forced shutdown and reset the SMC to get it to power on normally.

However ... If he switches to a user who doesn't have the PGP application licensed and running the MBA will wake up fine after being asleep all night.

Has anyone else experienced this? is it a bug with MP3?

Any advice greatly appreciated

Marc

Hi Marc,

I am recieving similar reports from another customer. But I have been unable to reproduce the problem thus far. What I am wondering is there is a deep sleep widget out there, that should force the Mac Air into that same sleep mode. Can you test with that and let me know if you get the same results possibly?

http://deepsleep.free.fr/

What version of Mac OSX are you seeing this on BTW?

Hi

I'll have to wait for the user to come back to the Lab to try that.  However I have just installed PGP on a MacBook Pro 15" about a year old and I thought I'd check to see what the pmset settings were and I noticed that hibernatemode was still set to level 3.  I thought PGP disabled hibernatemode to level 0.

Anyway I tested this laptop with the widget and even with it set to level 3 it still woke from sleep.

The MacBook Air is running 10.7 and I am using PGP WDE 10.2 MP3

Surely other people have had similar issues?

Well I have finally heard back from Symantec about this.

Yes I checked it with my colleagues and it seems to be an issue with anything apart from hibernation mode 0,3 and 25.We donot have the exact reason of the problem.However engineering will be starting to research on the matter.

For now I have used the pmset command to change hibernatemode to 0 and so far haven't had any issue.

Two things that I wanted to mention are:

Our PGP Desktop 10.2 release notes mentions that the safe sleep mode (hibernation mode) is not supported. I am seeing that it works in some cases and not others though. Still testing some things with my customer.

Here is the excerpt from page 119 of the PGP Desktop for Mac OSX for 10.2 Users Guide

PGP WDE supports normal Sleep mode. Safe Sleep, or Hibernation, is not supported and is automatically disabled.  

Yes I have seen in the manual previously that hibernation mode wasn't supported.  But what gets me is when it says that it is automatically disabled.. 

What is actually disabled? Is there a way to find out if something is disabled?

If it's supposed to mean that Hibernationmode is set to 0 then there must be something wrong with the installer because it isn't do it.

Also it only seems to be new mac laptops .. I had a new 13" MacBook pro in and tried waking it up after it had been left all night and it refused to wake from sleep in the morning. Could it be just the Sandy Bridge models that are affected?

Can you please ellaborate on what you mean by refusing to wake from sleep mode? What are the symptoms and steps involved in trying to wake it?

Hi Ben

I meant in the morning I tried to wake the laptop by pressing keys and even pressing the power button. you can hear some life in the laptop but you never get an image on the screen and the only thing you can do then is to hold the power button for about 10 seconds then try and turn it on again.

This was also a brand new computer with only PGP installed and the HD encrypted so the problem wouldn't be related to anyother third party software.

I am now trying a new approach to this.  Instead of changing the pmset hibernatemode value I am just going to change the sleepimage file by sending it to null.

So at the moment this new MacBook Pro has hibernatemode 3 set ( default ) and /var/vm/sleepimage symbolic linked to /dev/null

So far all is looking good but I shall leave it overnight and see what happens in the morning.

Can you please report back on your results of changing the sleep file to /dev/null? I was able to reproduce this behavior on my new i5 macbook pro with OSX 10.7 installed. We have engineering looking at it. They are stating that the behavior appears to have not changed for some time (since 10.1.x) but there must be something new about these brand new apple machines that is introducing a much bigger problem. maybe its that sleep mode is completely disabled on previous models, as the release notes elude to. But I also have been succesful in taking a 2005 macbook pro that is WDE encrypted with 10.2 MP3 and it has Mac OSX Lion 10.7 installed and it sleeps and wakes from sleep mode fine. Even sitting hibernatemode to 25 which does a full hibernation to disk allows me to wake up (while encrypted). So this behavior is a little bit puzzling still its seems that we get inconsistent results.

I'm on a clean Lion 10.7.2 install, and the only thing added is PGP WDE 10.2, but hibernatemode remains as "3". After the computer is left for awhile, it can only be accessed by doing a force-restart by holding down the power button for ~ 10 sec. Ater I manually set hibernatemode to 0 with pmset, this seems to be resolved.

John Colby, can you please get me a model number of your Macbook? I would like to know what model and revision it is. Maybe a few quick detailed specs such as the CPU, memory, hard disk size/speed, etc.

Hi Ben,

Sure thing. The model # is MC969LL/A. Here is an Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MacBook-MC969LL-11-6-Inch-VERSION/dp/B005CWIRPG

-John

Hi Ben

All new Macs that we have setup with PGP have the sleepimage to dev/null and so far none have had a problem waking from sleep.

I agree that this seems to be an issue with the latest models.

Marc