Outdated protection yields error messages
In mid-September 2007, a digital entertainment company was having problems with the Symantec AntiVirus (AV) software protecting its Windows 2003 environment. The application was apparently blocking viruses and malware correctly, but it kept delivering error messages. A Symantec sales engineer alerted the support department to the difficulties this important customer was having.
Michael, a Symantec product support analyst with more than 10 years’ experience, called the customer to investigate and quickly realized that it was running an outdated version of the software from 2006. “It was absolutely time for an upgrade,” he says. Unfortunately, the upgrade wasn’t the end of the story.
Registry to sysadmin: Sorry, we don't know you
When the company's internal IT staff tried to install version 10.1.6, even more errors popped up. It turned out that one of the company's four server groups was denying administrators’ permission to edit its registry, a crucial part of the Windows operating system that stores settings and options for all applications running on the system.
"Because they didn't have full access to the registry, some of those installs were corrupted. That was causing quite a bit of frustration," Michael recalls.
Hands-on update does the trick
Because he was beginning training sessions, he passed the baton to another Symantec product support analyst. Danny, who has been with Symantec for about a year, found out that the customer's system administrators had been trying to do the 10.1.6 upgrade through remote desktop access.
Normally this is a convenient way to update networked computers without having to visit them in person. "But remote access doesn't carry over all the privileges their sysadmins needed to update all the registry entries," Danny says. "And the antivirus software is sensitive; it doesn't take well to installations, removals, and administrative changes done in a remote session."
There was no way around it – as a best practice, the customer would have to install antivirus updates locally on each server.
However, first Danny had to talk to the customer’s IT manager by phone, to guide them through the de-installations of the corrupted AV upgrades at each machine, using a special software tool he sent along. Once they had scrubbed the servers clean, a fresh round of installations went perfectly.
Sysadmin to registry: I've got an all-access pass
That solved the original problem: "Everything was working great," Danny said. Still, the IT manager was concerned that the Windows registry might deny access to future remote updates.
On the Microsoft Web site, Danny found documentation explaining how to edit the security policies on Windows 2003 so that administrators get the same level of registry access remotely as when they're sitting at the machine, and passed this information to his customer contact.
"That's not really our job here, but we try to help out," he says. "I thought I'd point him in the right direction and make it a bit easier for him to administer his network, with the convenience of remote desktop access."
Whatever it takes
In fact, most of Danny's and Michael's actions were above and beyond the call of duty. The customer had signed up for only the most basic level of Symantec support, which doesn’t include this kind of proactive diagnostic work and extra research. "But we're more than happy to respond, especially when the call comes from one of our internal people who's working with the customer," Michael concludes. "Our whole point is to do whatever's necessary to make customers happy."