When I turned on my Mac Pro (Early 2008) this morning it started booting and then paniced. I had to do a force shutdown (power off) and reboot. It's been OK since then. I ran fsck and everything looks ok. When I logged in the Problem Reporter tool started up and offered to send the panic report back to Apple. I noticed in the panic log that the crash stack referenced 'com.symantec.kext.ips' which I think is the Vulnerability Protection kernel extension from Norton. Since it has recently been updated to a new version I thought I should post this issue to the forum.
I've attached the panic log. Let me know if you want me to post any other info or capture any Norton/Symantec logs.
Sorry about the problems. We're looking into this and we'll let you know when we can reproduce it in-house. Does the panic happen every time you restart, or does it go away after 1 or 2 restarts?
Thanks for the quick response. So far it has only occurred after 1 restart, yesterday morning. But I have only restarted my Mac Pro once since yesterday anyway. I will let you know if I get another further reoccurrences.
I have 3 client computers (Macs) that are giving the same error when starting up. I computer has done it twice on startup (2 different days) and the other 2 computers just started this morning.
Really sorry for the problems guys. We've reproduced the problem in house. Apparently it only occurs on high end machines with multiple CPUs, and only sometimes, and only during reboots, so we didn't catch this during our testing. No excuse though. Sorry about that.
We are working on a patch; we hope to have something out in the next couple of days. Stay tuned. In the mean time, try to avoid restarting. The issue only occurs when the Vulnerability Protection engine initializes, which only occurs once during system startup. If you must reboot, do so with the shift key down (safe mode).
Thanks for the update Ryan. Can you please let us know once the patch is available? I upgraded my Mac Pro to Snow Leopard (10.6.3) over the weekend and so I haven't reinstalled NAV as yet. Once this issue is resolved, I will reinstall NAV and apply all the patches.
I am also getting this error. it started with the latest mac updates (security/safari). i'm on a Macpro 2 x 2.8ghz intel xeon (not nehalem). 12gb RAM. os 10.5.8.
A new patch is available via LiveUpdate that should fix this issue. Please run LiveUpdate immediately and download all available patches.
After restarting, your Vulnerability Protection engine should be 3.0f36, which you can verify by performing a "Get Info" command in the Finder on /System/Library/Extensions/SymIPS.kext.
Sorry for the problems, and thanks for the patience and help in reproducing this issue.