Sophos anyone?

[robjduk]

I have Kaspersky at the moment which is up for renewal in December. Now I am fairly happy with it (easy to deploy, fairly easy to manage etc) but I have a reseller I use who keeps trying to push Sophos onto me.

In a previous job I used Sophos and loved how simple it was to deploy however one morning it caused untold issues when it decided VNC was a virus and stopped everything booting. This was however, 7 years ago so wonder how you all find it nowadays?

[timbo343]

For me it just works... and yeah, thats it. It does the job and happy with it.

[6Foot2]

We use Sophos and it has been used at every school that I have supported.

 

As you say easy to deploy and pretty much leave it to it once it is set up.

 

However one thing to note: We are investigating a problem with slowness on our network [starting packages, saving and printing]

 

The cause is currently unknown but things that are likely to come under close inspection are Impero and Sophos.

[synaesthesia]

It seems to work quite well, I use it at a primary and it does what it's told. It does seem to have more of a penchant for false positives than others but easy to set up and resolve those. It uses it's own login session on windows so it may cause issue with some filtering systems but again usually easily fixable. Edited April 12, 2014 by synaesthesia

[Jasbo]

We use Sophos at 3 schools, Shop around tho, I got it from swgfl at £1.00 per PC per year, this is the pro version with platinum support.

 

No issues with slowness here. There was a big cock up a while back when it though it's own agent was a virus... I know. Other than that I find it does the job and has some nice added features I use like app controls and auto deploy onto new machines.

[MatthewL]

It's great from a network admin point of view, all in one console, allows you to deploy easy but its heavy on resources compared to other AV's.

[FN-GM]

Do you have EEES? If so have a look at System Center Endpoint Protection. Its free, to manage it you need SCCM but it cost £45 a year, pretty cheap for an AV solution!

[3s-gtech]

Just had a major issue with Sophos on some 10.6 OS X Macs, where it locked them up hard on the login screen. Boot up in safe mode and uninstall, fine since. Plays fine on our Windows PCs, but it's a bit of a hog.

[caffrey]

Been using sophos 6 years+ no issues - it just works, fancy a change next time though to save more money might move to endpoint protection if I get round to it.

[Gatt]

We have sophos (For servers) and mcafee (Desktops). Had. 2 outbreaks of CryptoLocker on the Desktops - McAfee failed to detect it both times.

 

Worryingly, neither did sophos when tested.

 

Now looking at SCEP 2012 for the desktops, at least, as it did deal with CryptoLocker.

 

I've found SCEP and its forebearer FEP to be pretty good both resource wise and on staying tucked away until it detects something.

Being able to control it via ConfigMgr also makes life much easiet

[glennda]

Bitdefender for me - works a treat

[robjduk]

With Sophos, is it deployable via MSI?

[timbo343]

Mines done via the manager which sits on the server and just roll it out to unassigned machines which syncs with AD a few times a day.

[robjduk]

will it install the client on a machine which has been rebuilt? An occasional annoyance in the past has been Kaspersky not understanding the client was new due to its name being the same and not bothering to reinstall which is why I moved to MSI deployment with it.

[FN-GM]

will it install the client on a machine which has been rebuilt? An occasional annoyance in the past has been Kaspersky not understanding the client was new due to its name being the same and not bothering to reinstall which is why I moved to MSI deployment with it.

 

When i used it back in 2008 it did have a some kind of silent install, not sure if it was MSI though.

[lionsl2005]

I used Sophos in Primary School Pretty Easy to deploy and Manage. Now System Center Endpoint Protection in the Secondary Managed Via SCCM. Come free with EES licence.

[Jasbo]

Yes it will install to a machine that's rebuilt with same name, was doing just that this week, you can sync Sophos to ous in your ad so say every hour it would Scan those ous and try to install to any machine without Sophos installed, it's a pretty good feature IMO.

[Cache]

will it install the client on a machine which has been rebuilt? An occasional annoyance in the past has been Kaspersky not understanding the client was new due to its name being the same and not bothering to reinstall which is why I moved to MSI deployment with it.

 

Sophos provide a command line install string which you can use, I've added this to the end of my image deployment as a custom action and it works a treat.

[robjduk]

Well I will see what the pricing comes back as and see what I can do as you all seem quite positive on the experience. Thanks all.

 

On a quick note / dig... I can think of another piece of software which could benefit from scanning the network to see it needs to install the client *cough* solus 3 *cough*

 

Thanks all

[the_dude]

ours deploys via gpo, so all domain joined pc's get it automagically...the time where it flagged itself as a virus and quarantined itself was a bit of a black eye. When they call me for renewal I'll make sure that is figured into our renewal price as it did cause a rather massive headache....

[free780]

@DaveP I'm currently trying to get login times down. Seems like sophos is adding 30-40 secs.

[chris_uk]

Sophos provide a command line install string which you can use, I've added this to the end of my image deployment as a custom action and it works a treat.

Can you share the command line?

[Cache]

Sure, this is what I currently have in the setupcomplete.cmd file for our deployment:

 

start /wait "" \\SERVERNAME\SophosUpdate\CIDs\S000\ESXP\setup.exe -mng yes -crt R -updp \\SERVERNAME\SophosUpdate\CIDs\S000\ESXP\ -ouser OBFUSCATEDUSERNAME -opwd OBFUSCATEDPASSWORD -s -ni

 

The command line is built up from this KB: Command line parameters used by Setup.exe and the Obfuscated Username/Password created using this KB: Obfuscating the username and password in Enterprise Console

 

Worked pretty well for the last 2 years I've used it and cna be expanded further to put them in the correct Sophos groups if you need it too (I just move after I've done new deployments).

[robjduk]

@DaveP I'm currently trying to get login times down. Seems like sophos is adding 30-40 secs.

 

anyone else experiencing this? I got pricing for Sophos the other day and while impressive compared to Kaspersky, Kaspersky has little to no effect on logon speed.

[timbo343]

My login times are around 30 to 40 seconds but we dont use mandatory profiles, its only local so it takes about 30 to 40 seconds to create the profile.

 

I have however noticed that sophos on client machines is using about 150 ~ 180 mb of memory.