Situation - Resolution |
| In late August some of my clients began complaining about Symantec pop-up error messages from Symantec Antivirus Corporate 10.0 that said “Your message was not sent”. However, the messages still showed up in their Outlook sent box. Some of the e-mails did make it to their destination and some of them didn’t. The problem didn’t occur on all computers in the network. In general, users that were sending and receiving high volumes of e-mails had the problem. After checking each computer locally and checking to make sure the server and clients were all updating correctly, I then went on-line to look for a solution.
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What I found was a lot of people were complaining about 10.0 with very similar problems and a few problems that I hadn’t encountered. The main problem seemed to be that the Doscan.exe used a lot of systems resources.
Symantec Knowledge Base Document #2005042710304248
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The antivirus server was using so many resources to scan outgoing e-mails that it periodically timed-out. Symantec recommended upgrading to 10.0.1 or a registry fix or turning off e-mail start-up scans or turning off e-mail scanning altogether. None of the later was acceptable to me or most of the techs blogging about it. Unfortunately Symantec wasn’t offering the 10.0.1 upgrade to the non-profits who had bought from Techsoup Stock.
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You can read the entire discussion at Techsoup here. Virus Vaccination and Computer Security.
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Finally techsoup was able to convince Symantec to give non-profits access to the upgrades. Now you can fax in your license letter to Symantec and they’ll direct you to a
download site and give you a temporary password to log in.
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You can call Symantec at (800) 721-3934. This is the best way to do it. The reps answer pretty quickly and they’ll stay on the line with you while you fax in the license letter. 10.0.2 is now out.
This is a full-install, so basically you’re installing over 10.0.
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I normally wouldn’t upgrade unless I had to. Sometimes the newer version has more bugs than the older versions. This was becoming one of those situations. The only reason I recommended upgrading to my clients was that some of them were still on 8.0 and 10.0 has advanced real-time spyware scanning. Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition (PDF)
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This is a big plus because I haven’t been impressed with Microsoft’s Antispyware Beta, which is a real-time spyware scanner,
because it uses so many systems resources. I have always recommended Lavasoft’s free Adaware, but the real-time (pay) version gives the user too many choices that pop-up and ask what to do. In the end someone inevitably makes the wrong choice and gets locked out of a website that they need to use. (By the way, Norton Internet Security does the same thing to home users. That's why I'm recommending Norton Antivirus 2006 instead. See Business Case Scenario #2.) I’m still recommending the upgrade to 10.0.2 but unfortunately the install still isn’t as smooth as it should be. However, I’ve noticed that Doscan.exe now hardly uses any systems resources and the communication between client and server is
much faster on 10.0.2 than it was on 10.0.
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