Sophos V6 and EM 2 are out! What ya think?

[ZeroHour]

Hey

Just wondering if anyone else has tried them out yet?

I have found both to be alot more stable/faster then previous versions. You can just update the share and v5 clients will upgrade to v6.

NOTE: you can not get version 5 on EM once you upgrade to version 2. You would need to remove version 2 and revert to 1.2 to use version 5 again (hopefully it will prove to be more stable long term)

The interface is the same on sophos 5 client side but the engine now can:

Scan memory (why the hell did it not do this before )

Detect spyware and allow remote removal of viruses and spyware (and it seems to work well)

64-bit now finally

 

Thats the BIG things. Let me know what you find while using it.

I think its a little less resource intensive on bootup. Test systems here seemed to be more responsive while booting.

[john]

Been out since last Monday as I got it then, and its SH**, just as bad as V5, console already stuffed, cleared the database of alerts before updating, and already got 30,000 lines in it and needing weekly purging which I didn't have to do with V5's, deployment gone titsup, fed up already, tried the new puremessage and thats duff from the word go, so its just as bad, and we just tied ourselves in for another 5 years!!!! I feel like finding a gas oven and shoving my head in it as its no better at all.

 

I have told my friends not to bother as well as emailing some local schools I know well and said you don't want to bother yet give it 6 months!

 

As for V5 on it, you can actually get V5 still on the new stuff it is possible, it just by default loves the new V6 sophos out of the box when you upgrade so you can "downgrade" in its mind to V5 again but if its anything like mine it had taken over and done the dirty before I even managed to read everything.

 

Spyware scan is useless! I made a PC infected with spyware and it missed every bit of it! give me my trial of Trend Micro back again that picked loads up! Memory scanning was in V5 I thought, just not on by default but could be wrong.

 

Not too sure about the faster bit, I don't think it is faster but it doesn't seem slower to me yet so who know.

 

Basically my advice is unless you want the firewall I wouldn't bother upgrading to V6 until you have to its just not worth it.

[john]

Oh, I missed saying that Sophos support yesterday (monday) knew nothing about V6 and said could I phone back in 2 weeks when they have had the updates to the database and training!!!!!

[ZeroHour]

Oh, I missed saying that Sophos support yesterday (monday) knew nothing about V6 and said could I phone back in 2 weeks when they have had the updates to the database and training!!!!!

OMG

It works here in the initial tests. No problems with EM console yet. But its not rolled out everywhere though.

How many clients you got it running on?

Yeh I like trend too

[john]

Its on 350 PCs, about 30 Laptops which go on and off the network frequently (they are the major issue with V5 &6). The main database problems are its VERY memory hungry were talking using 1GB of RAM and thats all this machine does now, Sophos Sophos and Sophos! and its the main Enterprise Console thats the problem, the EM Library is fine appart from occasional coruption of it and a complete uninstall and re-install of it

 

But I was pushing for Trend instead of Sohpos , but TBH Trend to say they want schools as customers don't understand the need for good pricing in schools, they came back with a price of £8K for 2 years AV & AS with bronze support where as Sophos were talking something silly like £1200 so thats the instant barrier! and then when I said to Trend review as we cannot afford that at all they came back with a quote for even more! so they clearly do not get it yet!

[eejit]

I trialled version 5 a while back and was surprised that it just 'detected' viruses by default initially, you actually had to configure it to delete/quarantine viruses. Is that right, or is it a nightmare I had? Anyway, if so, has this been tackled in V6?

 

BTW Symantec Antivirus all the way!

[ChrisH]

That was the case in previous versions as well

[Dos_Box]

I trialled version 5 a while back and was surprised that it just 'detected' viruses by default initially, you actually had to configure it to delete/quarantine viruses. Is that right, or is it a nightmare I had? Anyway, if so, has this been tackled in V6?

 

BTW Symantec Antivirus all the way!

 

You have to remember that Sophos is a professional business product and is designed to be installed and configured centrally by people who know what they are doing. the last thing Sophos needs is for a company to install their product remotely entreprise wide then have it delete valuble work and files which have been detected as a false positive!

[tosca925]

I've only just gone up to V5 in the last month or so and that is working fine for us with no problems.

 

I'll keep my eye on this thread and possibly give V6 a miss for a few months.

[ZeroHour]

You have to remember that Sophos is a professional business product and is designed to be installed and configured centrally by people who know what they are doing.

Good point

I have to say we have not had problems *yet*. The big test comes at the end of the month when sophos release a new build. It had a bad failure rate in version 5. Would have to completly remove sophos from the machine before it would fix the problem.

[ZeroHour]

The main database problems are its VERY memory hungry were talking using 1GB of RAM and thats all this machine does now, Sophos Sophos and Sophos! and its the main Enterprise Console thats the problem, the EM Library is fine appart from occasional coruption of it and a complete uninstall and re-install of it

Ours is using in total (all services) about 60-80mb of ram, think something is seriously wrong if it using all that.

 

You said about version 5 but I can see it in the downloadable packages area. How did you revert yours?

 

Cheers

[john]

My RouterNT service uses about 60 on its own without adding everything else up, basically its leaks like a cullender does, fine for straining my veg, but not anti-virus software. But as Sophos know nothing yet, I cannot get it fixed As for downloading V5, I'm sure its a listed product in the packages, and you can subscribe to it as a seperate one, i'm sure it was, but as everytime I open EMlibrary it crashes I cannot check to easily, but will dig back...

[john]

Right, to update this thread, I have just spent a lot on money on a new shiny server for Sophos (3GHz Xeon, 1GB Ram, 74GB HDD) and gone back to V5, we have decided to have a memory leak on the Server rather than the clients. Some clients were using around 80MB of Ram just running Sophos in the background without doing anything else, which is stupid on some machines with 256MB Ram in them, so I hope this will help in the short term, and I will keep probing Sophos to get them to fix it, or hope that they fix it!

[Ric_]

Strange how Sophos seems to affect some people like this... I'm currently running V6 and it seems a lot more stable than V5.

[contink]

For what it's worth I upgraded to v6 recently without spotting this thread and I wish I'd seen it sooner!

 

v6 has turned into a regular process hog with some very odd behaviour eating up the CPU cycles and locking up the machine at random times..

 

I may be reverting back to v5 at some point but in truth it's frustrating to have to actually visit the infected machine to scan and deal with detected problems locally instead of using the EM..

 

 

For all that I've not seen anything else within our budget or any more tech friendly...

[ajbritton]

I've found V6 to much better the V5 in all respects execept the memory requirement on clients. I've never recomended schools try running XP in less than 256mb RAM, but a few have managed it. No longer. Every PC/laptop with 128mb RAM and Sophos V6 is effectively a non runner which just sits their paging its hard drive to pieces. Even some 256mb PCs seem to feel the pinch.

 

I love the fact that I can populate the DB from Active Directory, assign then computers to the right group then use GP to install the client.

[john]

Sophos is weird, end of I am also pleasently surprised that Sophos is happy to over-install over V6 with V5 Made my take much easier.

 

When you monitor a workstations, loading Sophos causes them to hang whilst it kicks in and loads, and when I estimate that maybe I have 100 machines in total with under 512 ram (probably 30 of them laptops) its not a cheap thing to do to upgrade all them to 512, I would love to but then there would be no new ones or new servers etc which are importaint. So its swings and roundabouts. I personally have lost faith in Sophos, they need contant pressure from us to do anything when we have a problem, they still have not solved my issue with XP Home machines causing huge numbers of envelops to build up, so I really have lost faith in them as a company, and no longer recomend them to anyone. I agree in some areas V6 is much better, the Active D is good, and the modififed reporting is good, but there is still a way to go, and certianly the client needs to shed a few pounds now, its going the way of Adobe Reader, it slowly grew and grew and is now so obease its no longer usable.

[witch]

Just a little word to maybe make you feel sorry for me....

One of my schools has an NT server which will not run Sophos automatically - so I am still doing it all manually every Monday moring.

My other school uses V5 though, so I will watch this thread with interest

[ChrisH]

I have had a go on two machines and they both deploy ok but then they wont update grrrr. Back to the drawing board

[mrtechsystems]

I got to agree with john I have ran Version 6 when it first started I think its a Killer on the machines I run a mixture of Windows 2000/XP clients and it not looking any good but the only thing I can say it the deployment

[ChrisH]

I was hoping this version would fix all these performance issues Mind you im in a better position this time as all my machines have at least 512 meg now. Anyone got any lists of exclusions they would like to share?

[Geoff]

C:\

 

?

[ChrisH]

C:\

 

?

 

/me slaps Geoff around with Sophos V6 :axe:

[Lord_Edam]

I can't believe all the complaints about sophos! We've been running V6 since the beta was released months ago and it's fantastic!

 

particularly the ability to scan memory for specified processes - great for the staff members who insist on installing hotbar and weatherwatcher everytime they visit a webpage.

 

the only complaint we have is when something forces the update to crawl on the client - it doesn't seem to be clever enough to block later updates, so when it does manage to free itself it spends the next twenty minutes looping through the updates it missed. Mind you, we have got it configured to update every 20 minutes, just so the icon flashes and reminds users it's there. Maybe we should change that to something a little more reasonable?

[john]

Well, im back on V5 and its fine, and the virtual memory issues have subsided, and my server memory leak is back, now currently using about 450MB physical, and thats all this server does we have about 400 clients on it, so we shall see what it does.

 

As for exclusions, C is a good one, but I gave over with them