Sophos v5 upgrade problems.

Up here in Lancs we've been switching Sophos from v3 to v5 on our school networks. We've been hitting a few problems that no ones figured out yet. Now I know some of you also use Sophos so hopefully you'll be able to help us out. :)

1. Some machines in the domain come up as grey in the Enterprise console. Attempting to do a remote install gives an 'unsupported operating system' error. Windows Firewall is off and Simple File Sharing is disabled.

2. Is there any way to get Sophos v5 and SIMS.NET to place nice. We've tried excluding various files from the SIMS.NET installation but it still eats vast tracks of CPU and memory.

3. Using the on-access scanner on some machines (paticularly domain controllers) causes similar high CPU and memory issues. This isn't a big deal on servers because I tend not to use the on-access scanner but we've had a few crippled desktop machines because of it.

Have you tried ...

a. Locally installing\upgrading Sophos. This seems to work for me when I hit those errors.

b. Uninstalling the old Sophos install and manually deleting all the remaining files and folders. Sophos tends to leave all of its old settings and config files behind 'Just in case'. Deleteing these will allow a local install to happen.

You should be able to install via the console after that, overwrting the new lcoal install you put on and bringing it under your control.

Unacceptable. I need to be able to fix these machines remotely. There's too many of them to manually fix them all with a house call.

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1. Some machines in the domain come up as grey in the Enterprise console. Attempting to do a remote install gives an 'unsupported operating system' error. Windows Firewall is off and Simple File Sharing is disabled.

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I have the same issue. Using SAVAdmin I can see the PCs and remotely install + Update. So im still using that. lol

You may be stuffed then. I've yet to find a way. This may be why Westfield have not yet issued the new admin tools and Sophos client to schools yet. I knew they were having problems trying to get it to work fine for schools, and it looks like we have found the very same ones they have.

Unacceptable. Remind me why we pay Sophos money again?

"Unacceptable" - Agreed - hence I didn't renew with Sophos last June and went to Panda instead. Same price, better admin tools, better detection rate including spyware - have had some issues with the latest client but nothing major... oh, and it's clientshield has a much smaller overhead than the sophos client.
Sophos got into the education market with some very aggresive pricing about 5 years ago but have since upped the cost by x3, so I believe that LEAs and Schools should look around at other products before blindly sticking with Sophos - my sympathies to those who are shackled by your LEA, but if enough people complain to them maybe they'll think twice...

We have put out to tender for our AV cover last month in Lancashire as Sophos was up for renewal. We'll wait and see what come out of it.

Panda is nice - you get a smiling Panda in the system tray :D

Not used the enterprise one though.

Whats the website for panda?
.matt

http://www.pandasoftware.com/

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Originally Posted by Netman

my sympathies to those who are shackled by your LEA, but if enough people complain to them maybe they'll think twice...

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Sadly i'm in that very situation, ironically tho i dont seem to have too many problems with Sophos, it was a pain in the rear end at first but once it settled in it seems to run ok. I do have the same problem as you tho Geoff, but i have been doing an XP migration over the last 2 months and every new XP box works fine, yet the old 2000 clients "appear grey" too.

You should be able to psexec the following:

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\\Server\InterChk\ESXP\setup.exe -user username -pwd password

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After Sophos has been installed/reinstalled this way they tend to appear in the console.

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Originally Posted by Geoff

Unacceptable. Remind me why we pay Sophos money again?

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But I wonder where the problems lie? Is it because M$ have changed some functionallity in XP (ala SFS) that Sophos had not anticipated on the systems they developed their product on? Or is it simply a crap product? Are the other versions (Panda, Norton etc) going to face problems when their next major release is due out, or are their current versions at rev x.7? Perhaps Sophos does not like deploying to computers where files have changed or become corrupted, educational software is notorious for overwriting system files willy-nilly. Maybe a point release will fix these problems.

What settings are you using for the AV settings? I have deployed it to one room and the teacher is complaing the workstations are running a hell of a lot slower. Some of them are taking 10 minutes to boot.

Which version are you using. The old one (with the lightning flash) should have quick scanning only enabled (intercheck), because if full scan is on then every file is checked.