Steve Erbach
erbachs at gmail.com
Wed Mar 11 12:12:20 CDT 2009
John, >> Sorry to see you had problems. << I didn't mean to cause you any grief. I've lived with balky computers for about half my life now; I'm not likely to shed tears over the latest incident. I haven't tried contacting Sunbelt support; I rarely call the manufacturer any more. I figured that there were other avenues. I considered trying a Sunbelt forum if it had gone on for too long...but running a Quick scan instead of a Deep scan on Janet's machine solved her issue for now; and mine suddenly started behaving as I related in my first message. Yes, it's nice to know *why* stuff (read "shit") like this happens. >> Every security product is going to have issues. << This is so. I don't want to go so far as to do what Dickford claims to be doing -- or *not* doing; that is, going "bare". While I don't visit dicey sites and I don't let my kids use my system, I like having a little peace-of-mind coverage. >> These were the same people who a day or two earlier were ready to hang Sunbelt staff for their sins. I guess the reality is that this is a field wrought with problems and live support is the key to success. << *Very* interesting! I'd have to hand it to Sunbelt, too. Sounds like they went the extra furlong on this one. >> If you read the interview above - he evens talks like me ;o) << Nah! He doesn't have that Winneconne accent! Thanks, John. Steve Erbach Neenah, WI On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 11:14 AM, John Bartow <john at winhaven.net> wrote: > Hi Steve, > Sorry to see you had problems. Did you try to contact Sunbelt technical > support? They have a technical support phone numbers (yes, you can actually > talk to them) and a chat directly on their web page. Used to irritate me > because it floated around. (I haven't noticed if they parked the thing or > not but I complained loudly about the floating bit.) > > Valid beef - I think this may be what happened to Tina also, who I tried (in > vain) to help through this issue. I thought it was related to the 5019 issue > (see below) but it wasn't. The next day I found out about the Thunderbird > issue but it was too late to help by then. > > This is a known issue that recently came about. Vipre was causing high CPU > usage when using Thunderbird. Sunbelt released a fix about 3 hours after the > issue became known. > > Every security product is going to have issues. The main difference for me > (besides being a better product than the others ;o) is that Sunbelt support > actually will let you call them and for their enterprise products they have > forums where you can participate and get real answers. They do have consumer > forums but they were based on a third party forum site and they are > revamping their support site so that everything is all in one place. > > Just to let you know a bit about what's going on in the Vipre world - > Sunbelt released a couple of new technologies to combat the constantly > evolving malware threats (like AntiVirusXP2009). > This interview is a pretty good read (although it seems to be a bit too > verbatim at times). (Drew and some of you that are interested in > virtualization would probably like to read this.) > http://www.h-online.com/security/New-VIPRE-fangs-An-interview-with-Sunbelt-C > EO-Alex-Eckelberry--/features/112535/0 > > 5019 Issue: > When Sunbelt released the MX-V technology last month (via update 5019) it > created havoc in a couple of enterprise situations. They had actually sent > out a notice to all enterprise customers and resellers that they were going > to do this and that everyone should be aware that the update for this would > be larger than normal and hence take more bandwidth than normal. Normally, > Vipre updates are purposely kept to a small size, one thing we like in an > enterprise environment (versus the McAfee Super-dats at over 100MB a crack). > Things went fairly bad on a couple of sites (6000 plus clients on a network > can use up some bandwidth). I was reading the Vipre list pretty thoroughly > as I didn't want any of clients to suffer network stoppages because of this > and I was fairly surprised at the eventual outcome of these tense > situations. (One of my clients suffered one issue, fairly minor, Oracle.exe > was prevented from starting on reboot. I didn't even know they had Oracle - > it's a background process for another product that I didn't install. Added > it to the admin known good apps and all is well.) After all was said and > done, the network/security admins all praised Sunbelt for their constant > communication and support throughout the problem. Even though this had > basically interrupted their business, these people PRAISED Sunbelt for how > they handled it because of their past horrific experiences with other > enterprise security vendors such as Symantec, McAfee, Trend, etc. I was a > bit shocked. These were the same people who a day or two earlier were ready > to hang Sunbelt staff for their sins. I guess the reality is that this is a > field wrought with problems and live support is the key to success. > > After everything was back to normal the CEO of Sunbelt actually emailed a > letter of apology for the problems and listing a series of items they were > going to implement internally so that it would never happen again. In other > words they actually listen to their customer base. I wish I could find the > letter. I would forward it. Unfortunately I delete Vipre Enterprise list > emails as there is an online archive of it and I have yet to find the letter > in the archives. > > I rarely think about CEO's of large companies but I think if I were to be > one, this is how I would do it. If you read the interview above - he evens > talks like me ;o)