Sophos Shield Problem

[ricki]

HI

 

Please can someone help. I have a laptop that has been newly rebuilt from scratch and its got all the windows updates and is joined to the domain.

 

It is in a group for laptops and gets both the internal sophos server and the external county server updates when on the network via the appropriate server respective of if in or out of school.

 

When its plugged into the network the shield appears and sophos works correctly as a local or domain user.

 

If you reboot the machine with with the network lead unplugged and log on with a local user the shield does not appear. I have checked and sophos is installed and will start if you click start, programs and sophos, but if you click start programs startup and autoupdate monitor nothing happens.

 

I have tested sophos and it does not appear to start the scanner or the updater.

 

I have contacted sophos and they say that they will not help as they do not have a contract with the school and only the county. I have contacted county and they are currently discussing if they should provide support they did check the sophos update settings on the server and say they will have a look next time they are in.

 

In the mean time I have wiped the machine and started again and its still doing the same thing. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling, I have tried running the uninstall script from sophos twice and reinstalling, I have inspected the sophos update settings and they appear ok, I have had a look at the event viewer and the sophos log. I have have run hardware checks on ram and hard drive and they are ok. I have checked some of the other laptops and machine and some machines get a shield when unplugged from the network and work correctly but other don't and I have run out of ideas.

 

Please can someone help.

 

Richard

[ricki]

Hi

 

I have wiped the machine again and joined it to the domain and have placed the pc into a ou with no group policies attach to it. I have then created a local user and installed sophos and the then tested it on the domain and it works, but when its not connected to the network and you log on as a local user the sophos shield does not appear the services for sophos dont start.

 

Does anyone else have this problem?

 

Plus does anyone have any ideas?

 

Richard

[_Bob_]

What does the Sophos service log on as? (Check the log on tab in the service properties)

Bit of a guess but if it was trying to use a domain account, this may fail when not connected to the network.

[Mr.Ben]

An obvious one, but something I once missed:

 

Basically Sophos would not start or update due to the time on a machine being more than a day out of sync. When I had a play around i found the Bios battery was dead!

[ricki]

Hi

 

The time is correct and all the services log on as a local user. I have run checks on the battery and it looks ok.

 

Have you any more ideas.

 

Richard

[ricki]

HI

 

The solution has been found sophos does not start because identd looks for the network and slows down sophos so it does not work. I have uninstalled indentd and copied the install file to the machine and installed again. Now it works ok as the program find the install file at start up.

 

Richard