How GoogleSoftwareUp can hang your mac and how to fix this

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From time to time my macbook was behaving strangely, starting with network DNS issues and ending with freeze. The only way to solve this was to do a hard reboot.
It did not happen so often and it was a bit difficult to spot the problem from console so last two times I had this situation, I saved the logs for further reference.

By comparing both logs (one from February and one from June), I discovered 2 similar messages at the begining of both events:

2/24/14 4:18:37.000 PM	kernel[0]	CODE SIGNING: cs_invalid_page(0x1000): p=26810[GoogleSoftwareUp] final status 0x0, allow (remove VALID)ing page
6/9/14 8:54:21.000 PM	kernel[0]	CODE SIGNING: cs_invalid_page(0x1000): p=4073[GoogleSoftwareUp] final status 0x0, allowing (remove VALID) page

Having this at hand, allowed me to have something to search for and I discovered a website (link at the end of this article) which explains a bit why. So yes, apparently GoogleSoftwareUp is the guilty one. I am not using Crucial M4 SSD but the sympthoms are the same.

Solution:

If you have Crucial M4 SSD (again, was not my case), do firmware update from http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx but the most important is to uninstall Google Software Update:

How to uninstall Google Software Update for a specific user:

florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app/Contents/Resources/install.py --uninstall

How to uninstall Google Software Update for the whole system (needs root access):

florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ sudo /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app/Contents/Resources/install.py --uninstall

How to disable Google Software Update:

defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0

By the way, if you want to prevent Google to reinstall this, you can do:

User specific:

florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]ls -lad ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
drwxr-xr-x@ 5 florian  nx  170 Dec 24  2010 /Users/florian/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]rm -rf ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]touch ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]sudo chown root ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]sudo chmod 644 ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]ls -lad ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
-rw-r--r--  1 root  nx  0 Jun  9 22:16 /Users/florian/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate

System wide:

florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]ls -lad /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  102 Jun  9 22:05 /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]sudo rm -rf /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]sudo touch /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]sudo chown root /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]sudo chmod 644 /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
florians-MacBook-Pro:~ florian$ [color=green]ls -lad /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate[/color]
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  0 Jun  9 22:18 /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate

Sources for this article:
GoogleSoftwareUp hangs the mac: https://www.jimcarson.com/2012/googlesoftwareup-clearing-cs_valid-and-mac-freezes/
What is and how to remove Google Software update: https://support.google.com/installer/answer/100386?hl=en

Thou shalt not steal!

If you want to use this information on your own website, please remember: by doing copy/paste entirely it is always stealing and you should be ashamed of yourself! Have at least the decency to create your own text and comments and run the commands on your own servers and provide your output, not what I did!

Or at least link back to this website.

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