This article is in regards to the SMP Agent for Mac 7.x and Mac OS X 10 (Yosemite).
Symantec will release an early support statement for running the agent on Yosemite on or about November 4th. A full support statement is tentatively scheduled for mid-December 2014. An officially supported release is not expected until early 2015.
The installation of the NS agent (versions up to and including 7.5.3193) fails when installing to a Mac with Yosemite installed. This is due to a change in how Apple handles application launch events. Apple removed the StartupItemContext file in Yosemite. Our agent-upgrade script (and software from other vendors, apparantly) relied on that file.
To enable installation of the agent, the following workaround may be applied to the Mac. It involves copying a StartupItemContext from a Mac running an earlier version of Mac OS X or creating the StartupItemContext file from scratch.
The complete path to the file is: /usr/libexec/StartupItemContext
The contents of the file (with mac line endings) is:
*************************************
#!/bin/sh
unset LAUNCHD_SOCKET
exec launchctl bsexec / "$@"
*************************************
After copying or creating this file, permissions must be changed by running: chmod 755 StartupItemContext
At that point, the agent should install normally.
Note that the workaround is for the agent installation only and official support will not be provided until it is included in an official release. There is no guarantee that other processes and solutions will function fully and correctly.