Mojave "full disk access" question

I just setup my parents with a brand-new MacBook Air and ran across something pretty weird. Their MacBook Air (13-inch, 2017) arrived last week. It came pre-loaded with 10.13 so I built a bootable Mojave installer and ran off that to reformat the internal drive before installing 10.14. I mention this because I want to make it clear that I started from a completely blank hard drive -- I did not perform an in-place upgrade on top of a previous OS installation.


One new security element under Mojave is the "Full Disk Access" whitelist. Most apps are prevented from having write-access to some protected areas of the system but certain apps need total access in order to perform correctly. As an example, I have two apps on my own MacBook -- Bitdefender Antivirus and CrashPlan -- that need this enabled, as is noted in their installation instructions.


As noted, my parents' new computer started completely blank. After installing the system, I added a few apps they use -- Office 2019, Quicken, etc. -- basic stuff. Near the end of the setup, I installed Bitdefender. Per the instructions, I went into the "Full Disk Access" section to add an exception for Bitdefender ("BDLDaemon"). But I also discovered another app already on the list: "smbd". (Incidentally, I found this item on the list BEFORE I installed Bitdefender so I know it didn't come from installing that.)


User uploaded file


That struck me as odd. I know what "smbd" is -- it's part of the file sharing system. But I have the same file sharing options enabled on my Mac as is enabled on my parents' station. There are only two real differences between our computers. The first is that I'm running the latest 10.14.1 beta so that's at least one factor. However, I found another 10.14.0 computer at work and looked at it -- "smbd" is not visible on that station either. So the only noteworthy thing that is different on my parents' computer is that I ran the HP Easy Start app (2.9.0.180) to add their OfficeJet Pro 6978 to the printer list. This version of Easy Start is compatible with Mojave -- whether it's responsible for "smbd" being on the list or not, I have no idea.


Has anyone else seen this show up in their whitelist?

MacBook Air, macOS Mojave (10.14)

Posted on Oct 24, 2018 8:41 AM

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Oct 29, 2018 5:47 PM in response to Mmrnmhrm

I have this smbd daemon appearing in the same way on my work machine - for me, however, it was unchecked by default. I have also been having frequent and crippling issues with SMB shares over the network and have just given the smbd daemon access here to see if this resolves any issues. So potentially is there a time or place your parents' machine has connected to an SMB share to have this daemon entered into the preferences?

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Mojave "full disk access" question

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