BCVITAdmin

I can understand the frustration of many admins. I am happy with the 6.x AntiVirus Product but I was disappointed with the new ERA appliance. Lack of good or relevant documentation and the automatic (until 6.3) installation of the Apache Caching Server on the Appliance were my two biggest issues at first. As for the product automatically managing and upgrading my network, I was impressed overall with a few gotchas. 1) For machines that had low disk resources, it was a nightmare. Had to reimage after swapping out drives to large ones. Failed installs kept downloading the code to install again and again, filling up the drive. Weird it didn't simply overwrite. Something for ESET to fix in their code. 2) Had some machines that were in the middle of the January Windows updates and wasn't aware of it. The combined process made the install and updates take 4 hours on the machines that still needed to apply the windows updates after the reboot! ESET, you REALLY need to put some code in to check that the Windows Update status is not waiting on a reboot. I ended up reimaging one shared station because it never recovered... ever. 3) Apache Proxy install on the ESET RA Appliance references the settings for a user/password in the Windows Server install. For some that have zero experience with Linux, that is a definite show stopper. Take the moment to create the document ESET, instead of just referencing it. The Windows Apache install document also needs some clarity. 4) What is up with Updates?!? I have 100 machines that grinded out 10 TB on my ISP in one month alone. That's nuts! Thankfully my ISP waived it for that month even though we have a 1TB cap. Apache Proxy Server fixed that but now I have 10TB a month on my internal network between the caching server and my clients. This was NEVER an issue with 5.x and I will bet that is why ESET was having so many issues with their update servers. Fix the code gents and your over usage bill will go way down. Would also fix your overall issues with the update servers. We only had 100 machines generate 10 TB, I couldn't imagine 100,000 or more at the same time. 5) Only outstanding issues we are now seeing are disk utilization. We see a constant 40 IOPs on our appliance without the cache server installed and now a constant 60 IOPS when we installed the Proxy on the RA Appliance. This is with us extending out the update window to 4 hours, no automatic program upgrades, and a 30 min RA Agent checkin. That is simply bad code guys. There is nothing that should be doing that with only 100 clients. I could imagine a larger install at all. Imagine those companies that still have T1 links or worse. To ESET: Simply put, 6.x ERA is making headway, but has a long way to go. I understand making sweeping changes to set your future solution up needs to happen and only so much can be caught in testing. Deadlines on your mind, code that won't work no matter what you do, and users vaguely giving you an idea of what is going on but just say "it's broke". I get it it. I was there many times myself. I gave you plenty of info above to help you make a better product and hope you use it. If I were the product director, I would focus on two things. Installing the Apache Proxy server is a must for everyone, so you must make it automatic and guide installers to use it with warnings that are honest. This should be done until you can fix your update issues. The second and more important thing is accurate and timely documentation. Documentation would go a long way to alleviating peoples concerns and allow them to feel as they are part of the process. An uninformed client is an unhappy client. A word of warning... those with less experience or are single man shops will start dropping the product line and that would be a tragedy, as up till now ESET was king to them. They are what sold ESET in the first place. I never heard of ESET through marketing, and much like how Google started, I heard about it through my tech friend. Forgetting where you came from and who made you as big as you are is a death kneel. My hope is you will head all our input, because we love ESET and want it to succeed...