I’ve decided to move us away from McAfee and onto Kaspersky. I’ve used McAfee’s product here for more than ten years and have been pretty happy with it and it’s protection has been pretty top notch, too ‘top notch’ as a matter of fact. I’ve in fact gotten away from even installing McAfee on mission critical systems due to it’s penchant for bringing systems to their knees at seemingly random intervals. It had gotten to the point that I didn’t even see the point of paying for McAfee since I had so sparesly installed.
It was at that point I knew a change was required: a virus scanner barely wroks to begin with, but not at all if it’s not installed. I’ve had a foul experience with Symantec (doesn’t seem to stop anything) and Trend (ditto, at least for their home product), so I decided to go with Kaspersky.
What was interesting though was when I first went to install it on a batch of PCs I got a bluescreen error on one of the PCs (my bosses system!) of 0x000000d1.
As it turned out though, the issue had nothing do to with Kaspersky, and everything to do with some bum DNS entries. In my initial testing I was installing to two computers of users who weren’t in that day, but then my boss called and said that it was installing on hers. I thought this was odd, but when I checked the logs Kaspersky did indeed say that I had installed it to the incorrect system. Flustered, I ran it again while double checking the computer name (which is fairly similar), and around that time my bosses PC bluescreened and Kaspersky again said that I was installing to the wrong computer. At that point I resolved that I would use the IP address of the computer I wanted to use, so I pinged it and plugged it into the script and as a joke before running it I pinged my bosses computer to see what it was, and it turned out that it was the same. My desired target PC had the wrong address assigned to it in DNS.
Kaspersky proved rather extra adept since it detected the name failure and then helpfully replaced the ‘wrong’ name with the ‘right’ name that the system was reporting and the blue screen was caused by trying to force an install over the existing install.