Any chance AT ALL that JSS could be freezing my Macs?

[janhy]

In the last week, we're having a high number of Macs catching the spinning ball of death after login. Most of the time they'll see the menu bar before freezing up, sometimes they'll see the dock. I've turned off all login/logout hooks and startup items, but perhaps they haven't gotten the update?

The behavior is really strange in that it seems to only exhibit the freezing behavior after a graceful shutdown. After freezing and force shutting down, the next login works.

What makes me think JSS, but doesn't make sense, is in the console, there are errors related to JSS:
Checking availability of https://jss.xxx.xxx:####
Error signing communication - Couldn't resolve host name
Waiting 5 seconds to try again...

[pbenham · Accepted solution]

Are you running Sophos Anti-Virus on these machines and are they running OS X 10.6.8?

If so it's an issue with an update that Sophos pushed out last week (updating it to version 8.0.7). We got confirmation from Sophos that there was a problem with the update - it basically hangs the user just after they log in (whilst the SophosUI app is trying to launch). We had to stop our internal Sophos server from pushing the 8.0.7 update.

[Millertime]

We had an issue similar to that. Turned out on that particular wireless segment, that port 8443 wasn't open. It was causing a couple of machines to be crippled.

[janhy]

Thank you sir, I'm marking that as the answer because it sounds sooo exactly what is happening to me. I was suspecting a sophos update...