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Symantec's AntiVirus 10 Deployment Woes?

Posted by Cliff on from the stuck-with-buggy-commercial-software dept.

loraksus asks: "We recently deployed Symantec AV Corporate version 10 across on our network and have been having nothing but problems. The new client breaks the MS Office install and causes machines to slow down significantly - some almost to the point of being completely unusable. The client (doscan.exe) also crashes very frequently (daily), and tends to take other things down with it. Symantec's 'workaround' is to drop by every workstation and insert the Office (or Wordperfect, it screws up both applications) CD, remove some office shortcuts and disable some virus scans. Since we manage clients over WAN links hundreds of miles away, this really isn't an option, nor is it an acceptable option given the number of workstations we manage. Are there any other admins dealing with this? Any advice? Solutions?" "It seems that more and more closed source companies are now rushing software out the door that not only has a couple bugs, but glaring errors that would have easily been caught in even the most basic testing. Of course, we in IT usually have no recourse against these companies other than never buying their products, again.

Do you folks have any advice when it comes to dealing vendors who release software that is unusuable and can't provide an acceptable resolution?"

7 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. uh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Problem solved.

  2. Sure by dtfinch · · Score: 3, Informative

    Do you folks have any advice when it comes to dealing vendors who release software that is unusuable and can't provide an acceptable resolution?

    Just tarnish their name with a slashdot article.

    I personally don't run virus scanners because of the problems they create. We have Symantec Antivirus 8 at work, but we've removed it from our slower systems and opted for more preventative measures.

    Virus scanners do like 1000 times the scanning necessary to be _reasonably_ sure that your system is virus-free. While useful when they actually stop something, overall the cure is worse than the disease. A human just has to check the task manager and run msconfig to spot 90% of the malware out there.

  3. What I've seen by MikeDawg · · Score: 3, Informative

    We just got the new Symantec 10 version. An IT co-worker of mine installed it independent of the control center, and we have noticed major problems with it already too. Outlook works fine, however it completely breaks Thunderbird, and also the terrible performance hit that Windows XP took on his machine. We have the control center installed on a Win 2003 server right now, but the server is completely bare, but there is really no performance hit with nothing else running. We are still testing it though.

    --

    YOU'RE WINNER !
    Another lame blog

    1. Re:What I've seen by over_exposed · · Score: 3, Informative

      I just did a rollout on about 400 XP Pro (SP2) machines and only about 2% of them had that Office issue. All it took was pointing that dialogue box to our network installation source and viola! No more problems. It's actually gone surprisingly smooth given the very random assortment of hardware we have.

      We have remote offices too and we VNC or RDC over the WAN. It's slowish, but I think having the Office installation on a network share would alleviate many of the submitters woes. It's helped us big time...

      --
      "The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
  4. I just rolled it out..... by nozlman72 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I just rolled it out to around 300 XP Pro machines on my LAN and 60 across our WAN. So far only a couple head aches with just a few machines on the LAN, mostly with MS Office (Outlook). The patch that Symantec provides works though. This all seems normal to me. NoZ

  5. SAV CE 10 is pretty bad by k00laid · · Score: 3, Informative
    We got into the testing phase of deployment and it didn't make it past there, instead we've gone back to 9.0.3. A couple things of note from our experience though:
    1. Doscan.exe isn't the primary client application, rather it is the startup scanner app. It is also the proverbial root of all evil. When Doscan is allowed to run, it kicks off a memory leak in Rtvscan.exe (the real client) and we saw memory usage hit the 75-100 MB range, causing the sluggish performance.

    2. The fix that Symantec is going with now is to keep the startup scan from running through a registry change, either before or after installation (KB article here). I tried this and it did help, but not enough to make it worth it , since I still saw a 30 MB+ memory hit.

    3. As far as I know anything between 9.0.1 and 10.0 is not readily available or even offered unless you call Symantec Licensing Support and ask for it. The very latest version of 9 is the 9.0.3 we have and it seems pretty good.
  6. Re:symantec/norton are utter crap by AntiGenX · · Score: 2, Informative
    Actually I found NOD32 thru the Virus Bulletin. Maybe YOU should go check Virus Bulletin, as far as I can tell the look about the same. So yeah, I'll take the one that doesn't bog my system down. Come back when you have some facts troll.

    http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/products.xm l?eset.xml

    http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/products.xm l?symantec.xml