De-Quarantine Synergyd

For those of you who don’t know Synergy is this fabulous concept of a Keyboard & Mouse control over a network connection.  It’s great for use where you might have multiple CPU setup and not using a KVM but have multiple displays attached to each CPU.  It allows you to use a single keyboard and mouse for all CPU’s, regardless of OS. On my Mac, I use SynergyKM which is a brilliant distribution of Synergy for OS X.

I upgraded my SynergyKM not too long ago, and noticed that I started to have this pesky pop up warning me that Synergyd application had been downloaded from the internet asking me if I really wanted to launch this.  For most applications this is a one time thing, once you approve this it never bugs you again. I’ve had this issue before, and it befuddles me why the SynergyKM team hasn’t fixed this, however I’d fixed this previously myself and wanted to finally document the process so I don’t have to keep looking for these steps again.

Because SynergyKM is a Preferences Pane, and as Synergyd.app is included as a Resource to SynergyKM it’s the quarantine attribute is not removed when it prompts for authorization.

To fix this, you can pop-open your your favorite Terminal.app. From here you’re going tot want to perform the following:

arkitec$ cd /Library/PreferencePanes/SynergyKM.prefPane/Contents/Resources/
arkitec$ sudo xattr -l Synergyd.app
com.apple.quarantine: 0000;4b15b0af;Firefox;|org.mozilla.firefox

You’ll notice that the com.apple.quarantine attribute is set since I downloaded the file using Firefox. This is what is causing all the havoc.  To fix we just need to remove this flag from 2 places, one a directory, the other a file. In terminal do the following:

arkitec$ sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Synergyd.app
arkitec$ cd Contents/MacOS/
arkitec$ sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Synergyd

If you now stop/start SynergyKM from your menubar icon, you will now no longer get the quarantine popup. This same solution will work for any file that you have this issue with.

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