Sophos Antivirus for Mac and OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion"

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mikebore wrote:

Putting the SophosUIServer app in the dock (not the the main Sophos app) makes it really quick to restart the menu bar.

I am convinced the diappearance is linked to updating.

All the other parts of Sohos are working correctly on my machine...not affected by the SophosUIServer stopping.

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In the absence of a real fix, that sounds like a clever and non-destructive solution; I'll give it a try. I think you're correct about the updating/disappearance connection - I routinely do a manual update when I start up or restart and in ML the menu icon always disappears.

Update - I tried your tip except I put its icon on the top bar of the Applications window. One click brings the icon back. I was in ML long enough for an automatic update and the icon disappeared as usual. One click brought it right back. Thank you!

Yes indeed, this is easy temporary solution.

Only thing which bothers me is that average users doesn't even notice absence of menubar icon. I think antivirus software should be reliable in any circumstances.

I think this is more than a missing menu icon. I used the AppMonitor program and once the icon disappears, the Sophosuiserver program is no longer shown in appmonitor. This makes me think it has stopped altogether. I can see no pattern as to when this happens. Sometimes after 15 minutes, and sometimes after several hours. 

I am running the retail release of OS X ML 10.8.0 on a clean install (installed onto empty drive using USB installer), and Sophos for Mac Home Edition 8.0.6C, and had noticed early on that the login item was never created during installation of Sophos. I manually re-added the item, but after each and every update, no matter how small, SophosUIServer quits and the icon vanishes.

I created an alias in my Applications to the UI Server so I can easily re-start it, but this is quite annoying, especially since Sophos said they fixed it in 8.0.5 when they clearly did not.

Please address this ASAP.

So what appears to be happening here is that when the update process kicks off, it closes the SophosUIServer process (it's supposed to do that), performs the update, and then fails to successfully launch the SophosUIServer process again when it's done (which it is also supposed to do).

Is there anything regarding this failure to launch listed in the Console logs?  It may help track down the root issue.

When I update (either manually or autoupdate), when the update is done, then the icon disappears and it apparently encounters a fatal error and the on access scanner is no longer running (as it says in the logs. EICAR is not picked up and InterCheck is not running). If I log out, then the icon is there but it is grey. If I then manually update Sophos, everything is fine (icon is there and on access scanning is running). 

OK, this is not the same issue most of the people in this thread are having.  I'd suggest uninstalling Sophos, running repair permissions on your drive (wouldn't hurt to verify the drive integrity while you're at it) and then download and install a clean copy of Sophos.

This may not work, as this does sound a lot like some other extension (SIMBL was flagged up in one thread recently) may be in conflict with the autoupdate process.

What fatal error number is listed?

I can do a manual update without a problem. I have tried it several times. However, I just saw an auto update take place and sophos shut down right after it finished.

Can you do a manual update that actually updates something?  To try this, disable auto updates and then wait for 4+ hours before running a manual update.  If you have the same problem as with auto updates, the problem is the actual data package update (the updater takes down the ui process prior to injecting the new data, and fails to start it back up again afterward).

I was experiencing the issue mentioned, so I manually downloaded the 10.8+ installer download (I could tell that's what it was because the disk image said that) and it worked great. However, just a note - when I opened up the installer, the image in the installer said "10.5+" and made me do a double take because I thought i had downloaded the ML installer. Might want to fix that :)