Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
I have a customer who bought a Sophos Endpoint Protection site licence a little while back. The company which used to do their IT set it up on the various machines in the network such that it was centrally controlled from the dedicated server and workstations got their updates from there. Then the server went faulty and we decommissioned it.
This left the workstation Sophos installs in a locked down state, unable to update, and impossible to uninstall.
So I called Sophos. The phone was answered promptly, by a human, who was helpful, knowledgeable, polite and friendly. I had to set up a Sophos reseller account (at no cost) and then could "simply" uninstall the existing Sophos on each machine and reinstall a stand-alone version which would be under local control, and get its updates direct from Sophos. He provided me with a link to and passwords for the stand-alone installer.
So far so good. Then the fun started. "All" I had to do was uninstall Sophos cleanly enough to allow a reinstall. Believe me, this is a horrorshow. We are talking heavy-duty hard work here with safe mode, Hijackthis, Regedit, services.msc, commands to delete things on reboot, and endless hours on the web looking stuff up which mostly turns out to refer to a slightly different version of Sophos or a different Windows version. Worse, every machine was different! You find a method which works on Workstation A, apply it to Workstation B, and it doesn't work. Every bloody machine requires a different bloody fix.
I did the first one in about two hours.
I did the second and third ones together. I got the third one after almost four hours, but the second one refused to install the update component no matter what. Eventually, I got it to work by manually creating a dedicated user account and then hacking permissions in the registry twice. Why twice? Because there are several sets of instruction about what to do and they are not all the same. Total time wasted on three machines ~ about 1.3 days. And I still have to do the new server, which will mean anything from a couple of hours to a whole damn day on-site, plus however much extra we need to allow for working around their need to have it operating while they work.
And all of this because Sophos does not have an uninstall script. Hell even Norton has had an uninstall script for most of this century, why is Sophos so farnarkling backward and primitive?
Sorry Sophos. I liked the idea of having an actual human to answer the phone, and he was very good ..... but I shouldn't have to ring up your help line to do simple jobs, and I most certainly shouldn't have to waste an entire day on stupidity like your absurd inability to uninstall yourself.
When the Sophos site licence runs out, I will, of course, be getting rid of it and installing Bullguard.
This left the workstation Sophos installs in a locked down state, unable to update, and impossible to uninstall.
So I called Sophos. The phone was answered promptly, by a human, who was helpful, knowledgeable, polite and friendly. I had to set up a Sophos reseller account (at no cost) and then could "simply" uninstall the existing Sophos on each machine and reinstall a stand-alone version which would be under local control, and get its updates direct from Sophos. He provided me with a link to and passwords for the stand-alone installer.
So far so good. Then the fun started. "All" I had to do was uninstall Sophos cleanly enough to allow a reinstall. Believe me, this is a horrorshow. We are talking heavy-duty hard work here with safe mode, Hijackthis, Regedit, services.msc, commands to delete things on reboot, and endless hours on the web looking stuff up which mostly turns out to refer to a slightly different version of Sophos or a different Windows version. Worse, every machine was different! You find a method which works on Workstation A, apply it to Workstation B, and it doesn't work. Every bloody machine requires a different bloody fix.
I did the first one in about two hours.
I did the second and third ones together. I got the third one after almost four hours, but the second one refused to install the update component no matter what. Eventually, I got it to work by manually creating a dedicated user account and then hacking permissions in the registry twice. Why twice? Because there are several sets of instruction about what to do and they are not all the same. Total time wasted on three machines ~ about 1.3 days. And I still have to do the new server, which will mean anything from a couple of hours to a whole damn day on-site, plus however much extra we need to allow for working around their need to have it operating while they work.
And all of this because Sophos does not have an uninstall script. Hell even Norton has had an uninstall script for most of this century, why is Sophos so farnarkling backward and primitive?
Sorry Sophos. I liked the idea of having an actual human to answer the phone, and he was very good ..... but I shouldn't have to ring up your help line to do simple jobs, and I most certainly shouldn't have to waste an entire day on stupidity like your absurd inability to uninstall yourself.
When the Sophos site licence runs out, I will, of course, be getting rid of it and installing Bullguard.
