This evening I decided to get around to encrypting my MacBook’s harddisk in accordance with our company security standards.  When we bought this first batch of MacBooks we thought hard about how we woud maintain the security standards we have in place for our Windows and Linux based laptops.  We concluded that in order to do this we would have to pay for encryption software (we use an Open Source package on Windows/Linux platforms), but security is worth paying for.

So I followed the instructions and installed Check Point Full Disk Encyption for Mac on my lovely shiny new MacBookPro.  Everything seemed fine and I was happy to see the ‘restart your computer now’ button appear quite quickly.

Unfortunately, 5 seconds after clicking that restart button I was greeting with a console error message:

Couldn’t init Graphic!

FATAL ERROR

Nothing would boot any further.  Eeek!  Quickly I get onto my desktop PC and start googling.  Low and behold there is a known issue with new MacBookPros and Check Point FDE 3.0. It doesn’t work!

Okay – at least it’s a known problem, so there must be a fix available.  After 5 minutes of registering on Check Point’s website to see the solution, I am informed that ‘To view this solution, Advanced access is required.’

So Check Point release a product that silently bricks my MacBook and then tell me that in order to find out how to fix the problem I must pay for a support contract.  Nice!

Maybe I should go round to their house, shit on their carpet and ask them for money to clear it up!

Then I found this:
http://www.ecshi.net/cat/linux/site/howtos/howto/fonera-openwrt

which suggests a natty trick of automatically restoring your working network config after 2 minutes unless you stop it:

`sleep 120 && cp /tmp/backup /etc/config/network && /etc/init.d/network restart`&

Nice one Christian!