shawkins

I came in this morning and I was going to give ERA 6 one more shot before I abandon my testing. Of course I ended up with the same outcome, not working, tasks failing, activation not working, etc. Then I did some more reading in the forums and came across the post about ERA 6 taking away the local update mirror, unless you use the Apache HTTP Proxy. It blows my mind that ESET would take away all the great and simply functionality that made ERA 5 awesome for whatever you want to call version 6. My maintenance is up in July, so I'll stick with ERA 5 while I look at other products to switch to. I hate saying goodbye to ESET because it has been great for the many years we have used it, but I can't see spending my time trying to make something work and keep it working while I could put something else in place that does just as good of a job and monitor it.

I've been using ESET since around 2006. I have always thought the Remote Administrator Console was rather simplistic, to the point, and functional. It wasn't always what I would call "pretty", but it worked and was easy to manuver. Now I am testing Remote Administrator 6 and my opinion of ESET's RA Console has just about hit rock bottom. First of all, the documentation is pretty vague, especially when it comes to pointing to a new repository. Some sort of syntax or example of what needs to be in that field would be extremely helpful. I would rather the 600+ computers download from a local server and not the Internet for agents, updates, etc. I have not successfully deployed a single agent from the console regardless of any proxy settings on the console or my proxy server. I was able to modify the agent installing BAT file and point it to a network location for grabbing the agent MSI file. I shouldn't have to do this. I should not have to jump through hoops to install a single agent. If I wanted to do that I would have gone with Sophos back in 2006 when you had to manually create a self-extracting exe file with WinRAR and create custom scripts to install or upgrade their software. Once I did get an agent installed (manually of course) I moved onto installing the EndPoint Security product. Once again, documentation is vague (useless), but I was able to finally install the product using a local share path. It was so much simpler in version 5. Okay so I have an agent installed, a product installed...now I need to activate it. Once again documentation is useless. Reports are useless as they don't show any real details about the error messages. I'm one of those admins that if I can look at a log, I'll figure it out. I checked all the proxy settings multiple times, turned them off and allowed everything through, but I can't even get a single product activated. I had to settle for manually activating it from the client, which is not going to work. I'm not going to manually activate 600+ clients when the RA Console "should" do the job automatically. I didn't care for having to recreate all our special policies. It would have been nice to be able to migrate them from version 5. I'd be okay losing some event logs for the sake of not having to recreate my policies from scratch, but I guess knowing what happened 6 months ago out-weighs that. My experience with testing RA version 6 has been just a little above using McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (back when I used it). My opinion is ESET fired the programmers that knew what they were doing in version 5 and hired in a bunch of graphic artists to make version 6. It's nice, I have to give them that, however it is anything but simplistic and functional. I'm sorry for the rant. I'm not one to toot my own horn, but I can usually figure stuff out pretty quick without a support call. If I can't then OK let's call support, but at the same time I'm thinking maybe I need to be looking at a different product from a competitor.