[DrPaul]

After restarting my iMac G5 (Tiger), I got a dialog box on a security topic that I clicked through, but am now wondering if this was a mistake.

To the best of my recollection, the dialog box had a title "Security Fixer", and had a message "Items in your startup security folder need fixing", with buttons providing two choices: "Fix", or "Later". Of course, I clicked fix. I was then prompted to restart my machine.

I have been unable to find any online documentation that this is normal behavior, and now I'm wondering if I approved something I shouldn't. Any insights on whether this is a normal operation or not would be appreciated.

[mduell]

Given your description of the app and the lack of results on Google, it sounds rather fishy. If the details you mention are correct, it appears to be trying to emulate a legitimate dialog box.

Here's another forum topic on the same thing, however it's not in a language I can read.

[CharlesS]

That's a legitimate dialog box. The issue is whether you actually want to do what it was asking.

What it means is that something ended up in the Startup Items or the Extensions folder, and its permissions were wrong. These things run as root, and so they have total access to the entire system, so they need to be owned by root. If they're not owned by root, the SecurityFixer thing will pop up asking you if you want to automatically chown them to root, or whether you want to disallow them from running. Otherwise, if you're logged in as admin, any program you run could just dump something in /Library/StartupItems and "0wnz0r" your system the next time you reboot.

Thus, it would have been a lot more helpful if we knew the name of the startup item (or extension) for which that dialog box was popping up. Therefore, the best thing I can recommend at this stage in the game is to look in /Library/StartupItems (the most likely candidate), and possibly also /System/Library/Extensions and /System/Library/StartupItems (although for something to dump an item in one of the latter two, it would have to have root access already, so you'd be less likely to see that dialog), and see if you find any foreign items that don't belong there. If something was malicious, it might make its startup item invisible, so you might want to use ls -al to list everything in those folders, not just what's visible.

Hope that helps...

[TheSpaz]

Do you use Retrospect at all? For some reason using Retrospect on Tiger screws with your Startup Items folder... that dialog does no harm... you don't have to restart everytime you repair it either. I get it at work all the time... all is good after.

[DrPaul]

This was all very helpful. The Apple article
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300962
does describe the type of box that I saw.

I also looked into the various directories suggested by CharlesS with ls -al.
/Library/StartupItems appears empty

/System/Library/Extensions and /System/Library/StartupItems both have a lot of stuff, though none have a modification date of today listed. Are the dates listed with ls-al or ls -alt reliable?

I don't use Retrospect.

Finally, I do recall one other dialog box that occurred prior to the restart. After quitting World of Warcraft, I got a dialog box that there was an IP conflict on my wireless network (the iMac and up to 3 different laptops all access my DSL connection through an AirPort Extreme base). I don't recall ever getting that message before, so I restarted the iMac, figuring that the IP conflict would then get sorted out. After that restart is when I got the "Fix Startup" dialog.

There's no other weirdness with the machine to report so far (although i know that's little comfort).

So thanks for the input, but I don't know what else, if anything, to do now.

DrPaul

[TheSpaz]

I would just ignore the dialog and click later. One of your Apps is putting something in the startup items folder that has the wrong privilages... maybe one of your Apps is not compatible with Tiger fully and that dialog is a side effect of it. I would be worried if I were you. Try to figure out which App is doing it and check online to see if that App is compatible with Tiger or if other's are having the same dialog. It may even be listed as a bug that is being fixed by the developers of that particular App.

Good luck my friend.