Kill Symantec AntiVirus scan-on-connect windows

Sep 06, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Some of you may be lab managers. Some of you may be in a lab using Norton AntiVirus. Some of you may be using external FireWire hard drives with multiple partitions for re-imaging and re-mirroring computers via Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper.

If you're one of these people, then you understand how utterly annoying it is to plug in a drive with about five or six partitions on it, and have five or six different Virus Scan-On-Mount windows pop up all at the same time. It eats the CPU, slows down the machine, and makes your FireWire drive go nuts.

For the longest time, I couldn't figure out how to make it stop, short of individually hitting Cancel on each window. Then I found a much faster way:

  1. Open Terminal (and you must be in an admin account to do this in 10.4.x.)
  2. Type sudo killall SmallScanner, press Enter, and provide your password.
  3. Do whatever you need to do.
In 10.3.9, Symantec AntiVirus (the product version I'm using is version 10, but this works in version 9 as well) spawns the SmallScanner windows under the ownership of the current account. In 10.4.7, the windows are processes owned by root, which is why you have to use sudo to kill them. Therefore, you must be in an admin account to use sudo.

[robg adds: I can't confirm, as the author didn't leave contact info, but I imagine that killing this process prevents scanning from occurring, in addition to simply killing the windows.]

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