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We are a college within a major university and manage roughly 250 clients and are currently protected via updating from universities anit-virus server (Sophos). We are wanting to migrate to a system where we will be the ones that manage the clients antivirus via Sophos's enterprise console. We have setup a test server and it is up and running smoothly.

We are currently trying to test deployment by protecting our IT department's PC's before we deploy to the rest of our clients. However whenever I go through the "protect computers" wizard and Sophos appears to be installing and updating onto the client PC I'm getting either the error

"Waiting for response from computer"

or

"The installation did not start. The computer may have been shut dwon, renamged or disconnected, or a required service may not be running. It may be running Windows XP Home or Windows Vista."

I have disabled windows firewall, and remote registry is turned on for the installation (both via group policy and then checking on the client PC itself). We will not be turning windows firewall back on since Sophos as an integrated one within their software. After extensive searching I haven't been able to determine where we've gone wrong.

Does anyone have any experience in using Sophos enterprise Console and if so, have you run into this problem? Also what were your steps in installing and deploying protection/management of your client PC's? We are trying to make this as seamless as possible when deployment comes around.

James Mertz
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3 Answers3

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For the Waiting for response message, you can try pushing policies down manually from the console.

FWIW, we do our deployment via a script in Group Policy, so that whenever a new PC comes on the domain, it is checked for Sophos and gets it installed if it is not already. Never had much luck with the Protect Computers way.

Christopher
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In my experience, "Installation did not start" is the MSI package for the antivirus engine itself failing. Check for pending reboots or anything else that might prevent an MSI package from installing. The Auto-Update service is what gets pushed & installed from the Enterprise console, and it bootstraps the Agent install from a cached installer.

We use a domain account as a service account. If the password is entered wrong during the install phase, it will usually hammer & lock out the service account, and cause much consternation among the agents using that account.

It doesn't sound as though you're still dealing with Win2000 machines, but for those I've found that putting the local Sophos service account into the local Administrators group fixes the troubles we had there. The same technique may work for later versions of Windows.

AndyN
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Try making sure that the remote registry service is started and that CIFS is not being blocked at the firewall.

Dan
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