Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Signs of Competence Abound
So I go to the new client for the presumably simple problem of one workstation not having done the once a week virus scan everyone else did using a corporate edition of Norton Antivirus. Of course, I should know that when they call me there for a simple 15 minute thing, they also have other things they have not mentioned, and the thing will prove not so simple.
In this case, I could see absolutely no reason the one machine didn’t scan. Best thing would be force a manual scan and watch to see that it does it right on the next weekly. Perhaps it was turned off. Perhaps there was a transient connectivity problem. Whatever. If autoprotect works, the full scans aren’t such a big deal.
I saw no rhyme or reason for that, but I did find the guy who set it up made it so each workstation did LiveUpdate directly across the internet, rather than the “server” doing one anc pushing to the workstations. I almost can’t blame him, because the screen to make it do internal virus definition updates is hopelessly cryptic, and in their case it’s not a big deal.
Then I saw that the last updates on all the machines happened on March 28.
What day did the other guy install and configure it? March 28. Took him six hours.
It was a simple matter to discover that the Control Panel icon for LiveUpdate was set to do manual updates. Took a couple seconds per computer to modify it to update automatically. Doh.
I left them watching and waiting for the virus definition updates to download on schedule, and they are going to tweak the schedule, since the other guy set it to midnight and noon, but at midnight all the computers are off except the night they stay on for the weekly virus scan. I’ll go back as needed.
By the time I looked at Norton and installed Adobe Acrobat reader - and IE6 as it required - for one of them, two hours of the expected simple 15 minute visit had elapsed, and it was the end of the day. Well, I also looked at the proposals for upgrading everything and building their e-commerce site. At least it was a better Tuesday than the last one.
On another note besides marveling at how bad the old computer guy was, why is it that everything has to use MMC (Microsoft Management Console) for its management and configuration screen? It’s just silly.