MacOS frozen system

[Michael89012]

Disk Encryption is off & disk has been fully decrypted and I'm still experiencing Threat Prevention crashing after an extended sleep along with the slow disk performance.

[SuperAdmin-mhc]

Michael,

Please make sure that ALL your McAfee products are up to date and match with your OS version, and when I say ALL, means everything including the agent.  Based on my experience with McAfee Products, if you miss one of them, it causes issues with the others. 

Good luck. 

[loganvandyke]

I just want to share with everyone that I've been going over a month free of McAfee freezing our computers after switching McAfee from Kext to Kextless mode. I HIGHLY recommend this as Apple is phasing out Kext Support and it will no longer be support in macOS Big Sur. McAfee automatically installs in kext mode. I was working with McAfee support and this was suggested after troubleshooting.

I have this script in Jamf that I created a policy for to run on all of my machines. 

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/McAfee/fmp/bin/fmp stop
/usr/local/McAfee/AntiMalware/VSControl stopoas
sudo /usr/local/McAfee/AntiMalware/VSControl switch-mode KextLess
/usr/local/McAfee/fmp/bin/fmp switch-mode KextLess
sudo /usr/local/McAfee/fmp/bin/fmp start
sudo /usr/local/McAfee/AntiMalware/VSControl startoas
exit 0

You can run this in terminal just by running each command starting at /usr/local/... put sudo in front of each command

It really has been a NIGHT AND DAY different in our environment and users have no longer complained of slowness.

[Michael89012]

Logan, thanks. I just applied those commands to my MBP. I will test and follow up with results.

[Michael89012]

Unfortunately the mini script didn't fix my issue. While I spent 2 days forcing the MBP in and out of sleep mode in various combinations of plugged in and not plugged in with the screen open and closed, everything seemed fine until I left it in sleep mode, plugged in, for over 12 hours. Upon wake up, McAfee Console was reporting that 'ThreatPrevention' was not Enabled and the classic slowdown was back. Terminal slowed down so much during trouble shooting it was faster for me to access the system from my Windows box via SSH.

One thing though is that the mini script posted did get ThreatPevention back online without a reboot and the system resumed to normal function. An OK workaround for me, not an option for my users.

Right now I will be disabling disk encryption to see if that is the root of the issue.

[SuperAdmin-mhc]

Logan, 

Thank you so much for sharing this with the community..

This is the lead I was looking for give the comments that you posted.  I have no clue McAfee had this commands available to us..  

I just applied these commands to a couple of clients. I'll report back to the community within 24 hrs.  

Best,

[SuperAdmin-mhc]

All,
I am so happy again, 48hrs straight without interruptions!!! No more OS freezing, fans speeding like crazy or slowness.

The instructions that @loganvandyke shared above worked for me. My Mac is working like a charm again. Once again, thank you for sharing.

FYI here are some additional deals.
macos: Mojave 10.14.6.
ENS: Web, FW, ThreatP all 10.7. I had 10.6.9 and issues were present too.
Dego: 5.1.2
MNE: 5.1.2

[loganvandyke]

Glad it worked for you! It took over a month of working with McAfee support to get that answer.