Sophos, what do we REALLY think.

[Dos_Box]

As I said in a previous thread I don't think Sophos is getting a fair crack of the whip, and those of us who have used it for years with no problems are keeping quiet about our experience with it.

So come on, if you have used it with little or no problems please let us know, and if you do have problems let us know about them, you never know, it may be your fault!

[E1uSiV3]

Sophos for me does a job and for the most part, does it right.

 

The Enterprise console is a little frustrating sometimes when i can't see a PC even tho you know its there, rebooting the offending PC usually helps. Older machines tend to be the ones which dont play fair with Sophos, and a RIS sorts out the trouble makers (ive never had a Sophos install fail on a RISed machine... draw your own conclusions from that)

 

The only whinge i have is sometimes the routernt process gets stuck in a terminal loop on clients and kills the performance (only seen it happen about 3 times over a year period across 250ish different machines) and i get the odd memory leak issue on the server (appears every few months at worst) nothing a service restart wont fix.

 

All in all, for the price, you cant beat it.

 

I am in a different situation to the rest of you, because i am now in the private sector, i have a choice to change away from sophos, and to be honest, i dont want to.

 

Hope that helps.

[Snuffkins]

Personally i've never had any big problems with it. Get the odd little thing, like it not wanting to install on certain machines, but after a quick rebuild it goes on no trouble and on certain machines it will update very very frequently, not that i mind that to be honest, it's just doing it's job. I think the only reason it's annoying is that you get staff in saying "i don't want it to keep running" "why does it have to do that so often" and i can hardly say "it's incase some is dumb enough to bring a virus onto the network in the middle of an ofsted inspection". Just find it odd that it doesn't update as much on others.

 

That a-side installation in straight forward, the setup is easy the interface is ok and it generally does the job you want it to do, which is protect you from virus's. What more can you ask?

[TechMonkey]

Love it here. Apart from the dodgy console at the moment (which we have it on authority is being upgrade next month) everything else is fab. We adore their Tech Support as one of the best around we have to deal with. This was typified recently when a piece of software was installed on the server and we think it corrupted the MSDE setup. Sophos looked into and even contacted the company of the other piece of software to try and work it out with them. Ended up dialling in to our servers and running all kinds of tests and loggings over about 2 days ending up with them transferring the whole installation to another server for us and monitoring it all to check it was up to speed. I think we have only ever found one person on the support line that hasn't been able to almost straight away track down the problem or work through it us, and that one person apologised profusley as he had only started that week.

Other love is the license to allow teachers to use Sophos at home and even setting up another remote library for us to allow them to connect to for updates, all within the current license so no extra charge.

[wesleyw]

I've been using it since 2001 and to be honest other than a few installs that for some reason are especially resource hungry I've never suffered from any other problems, updates well and you can always specify times and frequency for the updates to be installed/checked for I prefer it from say Norton which can be a pain at times. Good piece of software all round.

 

Wes

[ajbritton]

Over the years we've used Dr Solomons, McAfee, Trend and Sophos. To be honest, they all more or less did what they were supposed to, but none of them have been problem free. Can't really remember McAfee, but Trend was a pain when it came to ghosting (had to recreate a GUID or got duplicate PCs in the console). Nowadays, I just want all software that comes in Windows Installer format and can be used with Group Policy Software Installation.

 

The new Sophos console is a bit better in some respects, but all I seem to do is spend all day typing in long usernames and passwords. Why oh why can't it remember them, or at least use the security context of the user I'm logged on as???

[DMcCoy]

I dropped it 3 years ago. I hated it at the time, we weren't provided with the console under our lea agreement. Manual updates, stupid process of removing the whole thing and reinstalling it with that big ugly grey box. It missed viruses and when it did find one it didn't do anything about it. No central managment, no rescheduling of missed scans and some other mysterious issues that they were unble to help with.

 

Been happy with symantec since, although the nod32 managment interface has come along way since I last trialed it, I might look at that next renewal and compare prices.

[Dos_Box]

So it's your LEAs fault for not giving you the full product (I would have words with them about that!), not Sophos. What your LEA did was to purcase a licence for individual installs and not for networks. That reeks of incompetance by whoever signed the licence agreement.

[NetworkGeezer]

So DOS_Box, is SAV really the best enterprise AV product out there? Is there no way at all it can be improved?

[Dos_Box]

I'm not saying that, it just seems to be the object of so many peoples ire that

it may be judged unfairly by anyone wanting to investigate an AV solution for a school. Many of us here have had no problems with it, and it's time we just judged it fairly.

[DMcCoy]

Enterprise manager hadn't been out for very long (mid 2003 it seems) when we changed the license, it was savadmin or nothing. The lack of an automatic update facility in the sophos client for so many years was a major pain in the ass. Sophos did not do well on viruses I *knew* were there, and it would not remove the ones it did find. There was no sensible central managment or grouping options. Symantec had them so I moved.

 

Sophos may well have all of the features I wanted now, but its just too late.

[ChrisH]

I loved the new management interface that was great but the problems with the clients meant I had to remove it as you were basically disabling most of the scanning options to get somewher near acceptable performance.

I am currently back using the older version.

[Snuffkins]

If so many people use it, can it really be that bad? Ok maybe it could be a little more user friendly, but the same can be said for a lot of things. Don't understand what the issue really is. If you don't like it use something else, if you do like carry on using it and if you've never used it and your looking for an AV suite then test it and see what you think of it.

 

To be honest i've had just as many issues with other AV systems like Trend and Norton. It's just a case of horses for courses. Which systems problems do you want to put up with assuming you have any. I've had a good run with Sophos and it works well. If they didn't work well they wouldn't be on the market and so popular, well i should hope not lol.

[Dos_Box]

How old are your oldest client PC though?

[TechMonkey]

The new Sophos console is a bit better in some respects, but all I seem to do is spend all day typing in long usernames and passwords. Why oh why can't it remember them, or at least use the security context of the user I'm logged on as???

 

If you are on the V5 then phone up Tech Support. Once stations are all set up you shouldn't need to keep typing in passwords. After the initial discovery and installation then I don't think we've had to retype a password once, except for new batches of stations.

[Snuffkins]

Up till recently we had some celeron 533's which were getting on. Other than that about 3 years old now. They all ran XP though. I've always been pretty pleased with it, any issues i have had have usually been partly my own fault anyway and always easy to resolve. I've never had to use the support at all. Just works well for me.

[ChrisC]

Had no problems with the old version, and the new one with the enterprise console went smoothly, we just keep the usage under control by capping the update download to 16kbps.

 

Doesn't seem to effect performance at all, even on our older stations, and it does seem to keep the viruses at bay.

 

Chris

[Geoff]

I like the v5 console. Its much better than the old one. However, I've had far too much random breakage on clients. Clients not updating, clients not being detected or clients being offline when they aren't.

[john]

I like the v5 console. Its much better than the old one. However, I've had far too much random breakage on clients. Clients not updating, clients not being detected or clients being offline when they aren't.

 

Geoff, that sums up a lot of my problems with it. Its the extremly poor RMS setup on it, the console is nice, and the reports are useful, but its become a big resource hog, and has more memory leaks than my seive at home that I use for straining pasta

 

Sophos support starts great, but after day 4 of trying to fix one problem, numerous Webex sessions with them etc.... they start getting fed up and passing your round from pillar to post etc and you get no where fast.

 

They still have 1 call open from October from me for a major memory leak on the Server tools, it managed to use near enough 1GB of memory on a server managing 300 workstations! The initial responce was does it meet our system requirements and have you thought of purchasing an upgrade to Server 2003?

 

Now I decide when to upgrade my servers not them, they list Server 2000 as a supported OS, so why should they practically force me into purchasing an upgrade? That is what I have done in the end to stop me wasting many many hours each week restarting servers and reinstalling clients, as when the server ground to a hault, the clients also started locking up as the auto update would go on and on and on and on and on and on and on (you get my drift) so would refuse to log off or restart, so pulling the plug was the only option.

 

Again, Sophos pointed to the server, which was within there specs, but still they could not solve the problems we were having. So they have driven me round the twist completly, before V5 I liked and recommended Sophos, but due to the large number of issues I have had with it I cannot recommend it to anybody, unless its completly free then its a good option.

 

Things like with XPs SP2 firewall, having to open 3 ports and add a program exception to ensure that Sophoses RMS will communicate with the server is annoying, and on XP home, its very annoying. This last update that required a restart, some machines have now been restarted more than 10 times and still they report back they need a restart!!!! The database contained over 15,000 errors / alerts, and 0 of them were virus alerts, and they still cannot solve the issue as to why we get so many errors, they keep saying its machine X, so its gets re-RISed, re-installed etc and it looks good, but then another at random will go silly, but they cannot tell us whats doing it, or why.

 

I think they basically released it 12 months too early for the world, it needed far more testing before releasing. We were on the phone just over 24hrs after relasing it due to bugs, problems etc with it, now fine we were early adopters, but the support staff said they had no access to the right documents until 1 week after launch! and a manager confirmed that they had not got the correct infastructure in place at there end for it to be supported yet, so my view is they got off on the wrong foot, and it carried on that way for us.

 

I am keen to see the new V6 versions, I am interested to see if they have improved the RMS to ensure it works correctly, but somehow I doubt it will have improved much as its supposed to be more Enterprise Console updates and client re-development and to provide a wider range of support for the different OSes, and provide full intergration of the Sophos Client Firewall, Spyware and other utilities that the Sophos group are selling. So I would think RMS from what I was told the other month by them is not going to get much of an update, which I think if they fix that, it may be a better program and not break with "error - an unknow error has occured"

 

Anyway, thats my £1 worth of thoughts, I hope Sophos listen to customers and do the decent thing and sort the problems out and listen. I know that there costs have gone up again this year, and I have confirmed today that I can actually get Symantec and Trend for practically the same money as Sophos on a 3 year 300 machine deal, so for us its wide open for choice

 

I have got Trend on a 30 day trial, now they say I may need to open 1 port, but the machines are talking perfectly happy without that, so thats what I like, clever, inteligent software.

[Michael]

Sophos 5 in my opinion overall is much better than Sophos 3.x. My only criticisms are that the Enterprise Console definitely has a memory leak - I'm also using 2000 Server SP4. Initially I thought it might be WSUS as I run everything on one server. If I had the money I would definitely have separate servers.

 

The client itself (2000/XP) is much more resource hungry, however it has a new GUI and is very clear and easy to navigate. I like the fact the shield simply flashes and no window pops up to indicate "Sophos is updating". Definitely frustrating in the past when presenting PowerPoint on a whiteboard.

 

I've also heard rumours old 9x clients are problematic with Sophos 4.x however this may of changed since it was launched sometime ago.

 

We're now running Sophos 5.2 on XP which visibly seems no different from previous Sophos 5 updates. Will Sophos 6 build further? Is anyone testing it if it's in beta?

[Ric_]

v3 did indeed suck and I often found that it didn't remove the viruses it found without a lot of prompting (often making the problem worse by denying access to files).

 

v5 is a lot better but it does have issues with some machines and I have noticed a couple of dodgy memory leaks.

 

On the whole I do like it though and it serves a purpose

[Simcfc73]

I agree that it was released far too early. I had a nightmare getting the thing installed on the server and ended up having to move it to another one which didn't have the previous version of Sophos on.

 

The console is frustrating as hell. Loads of errors unrelated to viruses, computers not showing as on when they've been on for hours and the annoying warnings that a machine hasn't been seen for 24 hours so PANIC.

 

Oh and the fact that it wouldn't automatically remove and reinstall the new version so I ended up having to manually remove about 50 machines.

 

Saying that though the updating seems to work okay, the scanning works nicely in the background and the grouping is a great addition.

[Dos_Box]

I must admit, the error logging, especially over locked or corrupt files is far to extensive. I only want to see virus alerts, not every little problem Sophos encounters.

[witch]

As I have said before, I use Sophos both manually on an NT4 system and the new one on a Win 2000 system. The former does involve manually updating every Monday but it takes me about 10 minutes (NT4 won't run new version despite what website says!!)

V5 is great - I run it on both XP and 98 machines and cannot really say I have had problems. The 98 machines run slowly when it is updating but that isnt really a problem - I tell people to wait for the little shield to stop flashing before they do anything major.

The fact that we can all use Sophos on home computers as long as we work for Dorset County is the best thing of all, even if some of the teachers don't seem to get it!

In the past, I have found that the Norton removal tools for Sasser and Blaster were better than Sophos, but I have had no issues since. And I agree that the support is very good.

It would be nice to see a 'symptoms' area on the website as at the moment you seem to have to know the name of the virus in order to find out what it does!

We used to have McAfee and caught all sorts of viruses.

I havent used any other products but would happily endorse Sophos

[Netman]

Used Sophos (like most schools) for years until last renewal came round a year or so ago, when they wanted to triple the price. Took that as an opportunity to trial various others and went with Panda in the end, who price matched Sophos. The acid test for me was when I uninstalled Sophos from half a dozen test machines, installed Panda and straight away it found nasties that shouldn't have been there (40 such on one machine alone). I was always reasonably confident of Sophos detection until that. Panda also includes antispyware in it's product too, which is a bonus. It's not perfect - I can't always get scheduled scans to run properly through the management console for example - but for me, it's an improvement over Sophos...