SAV 10.1.6 Corporate nightmare...

[nihil]

Hi, brokencrow,

...the reason it was done was because it's billable. THE NUMBERS... the numbers are God in today's world.

Sure, but when I was doing that sort of thing, I never had any difficulty in selling the additional time for a test on a "reference machine" and for a contingency plan. If the task was more complex we would do a "proof of concept" exercise.

Was this "senior security analyst" one of your guys or an outsider?

I must say that this is a very weird situation. I can live with SAV perhaps clashing with some applications, particularly on start up, but corrupting video drivers and the looping reboots does sound bizarre.

It is a security product after all, it shouldn't have anything to do with video drivers, which I would have expected to have loaded before the AV? You may well have done this, but I would look at a sample of boxes that work and a sample of those with problems and see if there are any differences in the startup sequences.

The rebooting might be SAV itself? try doing a manual update on one of those, without it connected to the network? see if that solves it. I am guessing that an update of this magnitude requires a reboot, and perhaps it has "gotten all confused"

[brokencrow]

The "senior security analyst" is one of ours (remotely-based). He shoved
the SAV 10 server onto something like a 4 GB partition. Needless to say,
logfiles are a problem now. Unfortunately, nihil, there's little time for testing
locally as short-staffed as they are. The analyst's position is SAV's going
in on the corporate campus' network no problem, why should this site have
a problem?

The contingency plan was worked out after-the-fact by the local staff: a
rollback to an unmanaged SAV 8.1 on problem machines until they create
a new W2K image from scratch. They need W2K for some legacy apps,
particularly in F&I (finance and insurance).

I've probably divulged too much here already. My days are numbered now.
I'll post more details in a few weeks...

[nihil]

Hmmmm,

The analyst's position is SAV's going in on the corporate campus' network no problem, why should this site have a problem?

He should be sentenced to 10 years' level 1 support with no parole. He would get on famously?...................."That's funny, my one doesn't do that"

Sh1t! I wouldn't expect the most junior intern to be that ignorant and arrogant.

[brokencrow]

"That's funny, my one doesn't do that"

&*%#$@!, nihil, that's NOT FUNNY! Those were about his exact words!

Now, what is funny..er...ironic...is this is supposedly from one of the world's leading IT outfits. But more on that later.

[nihil]

Hey brokencrow, perhaps this true story will cheer you up a bit.

We were having a monthly IT Department meeting and somehow I was brought to comment that you never said "my one doesn't do that".

Jill, our director, said: "No Johnno but you have to admit that it is fun, isn't it?"

In my experience the guys who do that sort of thing have never had any support responsibility, even at a senior managerial level. Otherwise they would know the pain of having to sort out the aftermath or the hit that their SLA stats will take

Now, what is funny..er...ironic...is this is supposedly from one of the world's leading IT outfits.

CSC?..................................

[brokencrow]

The only thing that cheers me up, nihil, is the thought of bailing on this "chop shop!"

[TechieGirl]

I recently migrated my SAV CE from v10.0.2 to v10.1.6. When I performed the migration on my servers everything looked ok at first but then I noticed that on my primary server SAV kept kicking off installs one after another. At one point I saw at least six installation processes running at the same time. It was like a Chinese fire drill trying to cancel them all. This would happen any time I tried to open the SAV GUI or touch anything else that involved SAV. I called Symantec support and the engineer had me put the disk into the cd drive on the server and try to complete the install, it reported that the install was already completed. Yet SAV continued to try to install itself all by itself over and over again. The engineer then told me that I would need to uninstall and reinstall the product because something must have been corrupt with the initial install. First I had to move all my connected clients from the primary server to the secondary server and then uninstall the primary server. When I tried to uninstall through add/remove programs I got an error message telling me that there was an incomplete install and that I needed to let that finish before I could uninstall. Reboots didn't help this either. The engineer then sent me the NoNav utiity to run on the server to remove the program. This is when the real horror started. In subsequent phone conversations that I've had with Symantec engineers and an escalation manager it appears there is a fault in 10.1.6 that, when installed, associates itself with a lot of things that it has no business doing. As a result the NoNav utility wiped out most of my MS Exchange files and executables along with an as yet unknown number of other things. My NSI Double Take replication software no longer works, I have screwed up print queues and a whole range of problems. The consensus of opinion from the Symantec engineers and myself is that the server has to be rebuilt from scratch. They told me that it was not NoNav's fault because add/remove programs would have done the same thing.

To sum this up, according to Symantec, there is a known fault with the installer. They say it only effects the server installs. If you uninstall the product v10.1.6 using either the NoNav utility or add/remove programs it will remove a great many files that it shouldn't such as program executables belonging to other software and the operating system.

If you need to uninstall this product you'll need to do it manually with registry edits and manual file removal otherwise you're likely to have huge problems as I am having now.

[brokencrow]

NoNAV has worked well for us on clients. The SAV server's not in my
"bucket", so whether or not NoNAV works on it, well...enough said.

Jeez, we're four weeks out from the upgrade and every day we lose at
least one W2K workstation. Today it was three. We've narrowed the
issue down to SMS. SAV's affected Office of all things, but only on some
units. Some are easy fixes, some are...ugh...ugly...

At this point, I'm pushing for a whole new W2K image sans SMS for the problem machines. I'm tired...