Sophos advice needed please.

[Kyle]

I have been told to look at upgrading our current Sophos version. Our head of ICT has had a letter telling them about Enterprise Console. My boss (systems manager) has passed this on to me....as he cant be asred......! I have checked our server and it seems to be running SAV Admin, as i can tell nearly clients are updating ok. I manually did an install from the i386 folder on the server and checked the version which was 4.0.xx at this point i am not convinced that all clients are the same version.

 

i have read all the post on the forum about issues with people who have upgraded to 5.0xx and i am a bit worried. i have a few quesions i am confused with.

 

1. Should i upgrade if so how?

2. Can i install the console instead of SAV admin and still keep version 4?

3. Do i need to completely unistall off the server and do fresh install of EM Library and the console?

4. is it right that you cannot have version 5 on a RIS image (somthing to do with the SID?)

 

Please advise me

[Geoff]

1. uninstall then reinstall. Clients might autoupgrade if your lucky. If not they will require manual intervention.

2. no

3. yes

[john]

I would maybe try it now, as some bugs have gone. Support for the old one has not ended yet. One thing I would maybe aim to do is do it at Half Term or Easter when you have time to fix and tinker with it as working on sophos deploys on a busy network is not fun at times, I have had it slow ours down to a snails pace, and normally nothing slowed it down.

 

I have just spent £2K on a new server just for Sophos (and praying it does not destroy a 4th server!) and it now runs on Windows 2003, and seems good. It hates talking to old clients for upgrading them or even incorect installs of the new client, so the best thing to do is un-install the old one manually from servers and any high usage areas (IE easy virus pick up locations) EG I did the IT rooms and high access machines and servers, and then deploy from the server to them so they are 100% working, and then I try and "upgrade / deploy" over the old version on other machines, if it works, all is rosey, if it fails, I just add it to the job list to go and manaully deal with it later.

[witch]

I managed to install Sophos no problem on a Win2000 server running 98 and XP machines. The system ran fine, but there were a few issues with some computers not picking up the updates. To be honest, I spent some time on the phone with the support people and it all went swimmingly after that. Sometimes it looks as if the 98 machines havent updated but that is a failing of the 'reporting' system and not the machines.

The most important tip I have is: make sure EVERY trace of Sophos is off your server or you will get all sorts of conflicts.

Good luck

[Rozzer]

We have sophos EM libary here. It is a right resource killer. The problems we have with the cpu usage being taken up we are looking into a new box for it.

 

Ross

[everton4europe]

have a look at trend client server. not as resource hungry and i find a better package all together.

[john]

@Ross2K5, we have had that issue with Sophos and its part of the grand scheme of faults we had, the high CPU usage of various sophos componets. DLLloader is a key, as well as the SAVservice, RouterNT.exe and some others I have forgotten!

 

Our CPU usage went up down up down up down up down up down with one Sophos service running, when we stopped it it went back to normal usage pattern. Sophos have not been intouch with me recently about my 20 cases logged with them but despite a new install its starting to show errors already which is not a good sign. When we stopped the high CPU usage we then got stupid memory usage so we could not win, CPU we could manage, memory was far more dangerous, so would have rather had high CPU.

 

One thing to note is that there is a new build of the client due Mid March which will cause lots of console errors if machines are not restarted after its installation, my advice to anybody who is not using the new setup yet is wait for the new build to come and deploy that, give the console a fighting chance of living to start with.