Antivirus: June 2008 Archives
Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager Console (SEP11) allows authentication through local accounts, Active Directory and SecurID. SecurID is a two factor authentication system which combines a user known PIN and a token generated 6 digit code for authentication. The token is generated every 60 seconds.
Because the SecurID passcode is always changing imagine my surprise when I attempted to log into SEPM and I received an error that my password has expired. After checking the KB and the Symantec forums and not finding an answer, I opened a case with support. Support tells me that this is a known issue that should be fixed in a future maintenance release.
For now I'm either going to have to configure AD authentication for people requiring access to the SEPM console (such as admins and helpdesk). If I continue with SecurID accounts I'll have to recreate their accounts every 90 days.
I think its a really good idea to use AD or SecurID for authentication so that each administrator doesn't end up with 50 accounts with bad passwords that are never changed. It would be preferable however if the authentiction actually worked correctly.
No conclusions can be drawn from this single instance comparison. I called both Sophos and Symantec tech support to ask them a simple question. Are there any known interoperability issues between your product (SEP11, and Sophos AV/AF) and PGP. We have seen conflicts in the past between some personal firewall clients and PGP and we'd like to know of any issues.
First I checked the knowledge base articles for each vendor. A search for 'PGP' returned nothing on each website.
Next a call to Sophos. I got the phone number off their public website. This was not a support line for evaluation customers. I called, went through the phone menu and was talking to tech support after maybe a minute of hold time. He knew there was a potential issue and read me a KB article from their internal system. There is an issue when PGP is installed after Sophos. Couldn't expect much more, although I dont see why that article wasn't in the Public KB.
Next a call to Symantec. It took 3 minutes to get to the call pre-screener. This person couldn't find my contact information...asking me if I've called before. Yeah for the past 8 years. 9 minutes into the call I finally escape the pre-screen and get into the real phone queue. The recording says the customer waiting the longest has been on hold for 7 minutes. That is incredible. I was expecting to be on hold for 2 hours, since I called in the afternoon. In about 5 more minutes, I talked to the tech who was not aware of any PGP issues. I pointed out that PGP interoperability problems would occur most when managing what applications can run, which is off by default. He checked with other people and no one was aware of any issues.
This difference in support on this one call as not as great as I expected. I could live with either one. I just need to get my Symantec account straightened out so I don't have to fight with the prescreener so much.
