I now have an IT-managed Mac at work, which means that I had to cede a little control and allow weird stuff I don’t understand to run on it.
I was disturbed today to find a root-owned process, repmgr, using a bunch of CPU. Some quick Googling suggests that repmgr is for Postgres replication, which is problematic because I don’t use Postgres and don’t have it installed.
It turns out that there’s another, unrelated repmgr, though! /Applications/Confer.app/Contents/MacOS/repmgr is the path to the running executable for me. repmgr is also the name of a component of Confer / Carbon Black, some sort of enterprise security software for Macs. I haven’t had the chance to figure out exactly what it does, but based on some of the strings in it, I suspect it’s short for “Reputation Manager.”
Be careful with major upgrades while Carbon Black is running.
I’ve seen it not survive major OS upgrades a few times and tank the OS boot process. Yay kernel extensions…
Yeesh! Our IT department has actually shared the same recommendation, though. I’ve applied the minor version updates, but haven’t updated to the latest major release just yet.
I still think that the line between malware and anti-virus software is oddly blurred. Chaotic Evil vs. Chaotic Neutral claiming to be Chaotic Good.