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ymugmike10
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Drive Genius warning opening FMWare Fusion

Why does VMWare Fusion 11.5.3 Windows running windows 10 in an iMac with Mac OS  10.15.6 Catalina keep showing warnings from Drive Genius?

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wila
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Hi,

Drive Genius is correct that there is a change with the LaunchDaemon plist files and how VMware Fusion handles these.

There was a report about this somewhere earlier, but I am not able to find it anymore.

Hopefully Drive Genius has a way to suppress these warning or check that they are set by the official VMware Fusion application so that they can suppress them.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva

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scott28tt
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Does Fusion appear in your list of Login Items?

Change Users & Groups Login Items preferences on Mac - Apple Support


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ymugmike10
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Hi,

Neither Drive Genius nor VMWare Fusion is on the list of Login items.

The problem appears to have come about through updating to Mac OS 10.15 Catalina.

I am advised by Prosoft of the following -

"Okay thank you for your patience on this, our development team was able to look into this and it seems that VM Fusion added these helpers/Plist files with there release of version 11. Meaning they previously never had Plist files for there software.

Drive pulse is notifying that these files are being added as a notification and only a notification. However, something else is re-adding or editing them. Our dev team mentioned that it does not seem to be the latter due to the content that was found in them. This means either something is deleting them once the software is closed or they are being added every time the software is launched.

I would recommend that you reach out to VMware on this as there are no errors with Drive Pulse's reporting mechanisms. And there may be a bug with Plist files."

Any further advise?

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scott28tt
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Seems from this article that Fusion has used plist files since at least 3.x: VMware Knowledge Base

I wonder if their code is better than their use of the English language:

"VM Fusion added these helpers/Plist files with there release of version 11. Meaning they previously never had Plist files for there software."


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Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
VMware Training & Certification blog
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ColoradoMarmot
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I suspect the plist files are touched during launch which is creating a false positive in drive genius.

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wila
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Hi,

Drive Genius is correct that there is a change with the LaunchDaemon plist files and how VMware Fusion handles these.

There was a report about this somewhere earlier, but I am not able to find it anymore.

Hopefully Drive Genius has a way to suppress these warning or check that they are set by the official VMware Fusion application so that they can suppress them.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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wila
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That would also make sense, yes.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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ymugmike10
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Thank you for all your suggestions - even the pickup of poor grammar use. It may be that their use is neither here nor there.

I will go back to Prosoft to see whether they can have another look.

I may be back.

ymugmike10
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I have since received the following response from Prosoft who produce Drive Genius.

1. Drive Pulse is doing its job and notifying you that changes were made to the file. Files should not be changed on a daily basis or when you open up the software. It is not normal practice from what the developers inform me.

2. The only thing would be that you reach out to VMware support to report this issue and get an answer if they are making changes to the files upon startup of the software/computer.

How can I get to VMWare support themselves to get this message across and ask why it is happening. Prosoft thinks that it is not good practice.

Regards

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scott28tt
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Two options:

1. Wait for someone in the Fusion team to spot this thread.

2. Fusion Support, Training & Technical Documentation


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Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
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ymugmike10
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I find it completely impossible to work through the VMWare support pages. Reference to other articles that are so complex that there is no straightforward option to 'do this' or 'click here'.

How often will somebody from the Fusion team check these pages?

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ColoradoMarmot
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This would be considered a false positive - you should be able to whitelist those files in Drive Genius (and if you can't, then it's not very good FIM)

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ymugmike10
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Isn't this a matter for both Prosoft and VMWare to sort out on behalf of their customers.

I am an end user, so 'white listing' and using Terminal to sort out an issue is not what I believe I should be doing.

Occasionally, different programs appear with a Drive Genius warning depending upon what I am doing with it. For instance reloading Backblaze as my norma 'Standard'l account had not been used for a few days due to another issue that required an Administer's account instead.

Thank you for all responses up to now.

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ColoradoMarmot
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Not for Fusion at all - this is a problem with a blunt-force low-end security solution.  I do cybersecurity for a living, and false positives are a pervasive problem - tuning the security solution (in this case FIM) is a the answer.  If Drive Genius doesn't have whitelisting capability, that's a feature gap in their system.

For what it's worth, with SIP, I'm not sure the real-world utility of FIM on an endpoint.  The only use case I can think of is early alerting if ransomware starts encrypting the system, but there's better ways to detect/avoid that.