Me too!!! I'm already on Sophos myself, I was a reseller for Ontrack,
and as a result, at least 20 of my clients have been left out in the
cold on this as well. Oddly I emailed V-Com reseller support several
days ago to let them know that I needed a: pricing, and b: was
planning on moving my customers to something else if I didn't hear
back from them (I have yet to hear back of course). I guess they
don't like to sell things even though they're supposedly pushing a new
product? Anyway, don't know if everyone else noticed this, but
they've also changed to yearly licensing on AV updates (so much for
the perpetual licenses we bought)!?!? Last time I checked, didn't
Microsoft get in some sort of legal trouble for trying to define their
own idea of product life cycles by trying to stop making updates
available for older software? I thought you couldn't legally do any
of this, but I suppose they probably won't stay afloat long enough to
get sued at this point!
Anyway, I'm moving everyone that doesn't decide to upgrade to version
5 (which I think will be absolutely everyone) over to Sophos, and
Sygate personal firewall by it's self for a software firewall.
Shameless plug: if anyone's interested in getting in on the Sophos
thing at some point email me (I can get you a good break on it as a
reseller). Either way, do have a look at Sophos, I've found it to be
pretty much bullet proof, and very low on system resources (when
properly configured) in the two years that I've been using it, which
is a lot more than I can say for anything else I've ever used. They
do have a 5 user license minimum though, so it's not intended for home
users, but I'm working on something that would allow me to distribute
the licenses individually as an extension of my company's services.
(I'll shut up now about all of that now).
I will give System Suite regardless of terrible support, and etc. from
V-Com that the utilities part is still good, better than Norton in my
experience, and less expensive to boot, and the implementation of
Sygate is reasonable for basic needs, but you don't really need
version 5 for most of that.
BTW, completely off topic, but I've also found out the hard way
recently that if you're running any version of Sygate including the
one in System Suite, you don't want to download the "Integrated tools"
update for Spybot Search and Destroy. I've been meaning to email them
about this, but haven't gotten to it. Anyway, what happened to
several machines I saw was that the update "fixed" without any
confirmation some "incorrect network settings", which then rendered
the firewall useless (unless you don't like to get online, in which
case it's very effective as a traffic blocker). So, basically all it
did was make it so the firewall couldn't see any programs, and
therefore applied the default "block_all" rule, as it couldn't
identify the traffic!! The only way I could find to fix this on one
machine was to completely uninstall both, then reinstall both, and
make sure to exclude the update from future searches. On another
machine running XP the only solution was the above plus a system
restore to before the update (luckily had the restore point), on
another machine running 2000, it rendered TCP/IP completely useless,
regardless of the installation state of both programs, the only
solution to this was a repair install. Luckily I haven't run into
this on anything 9x yet, but I'm imagining that might mean clean
install!! Anyway, if you are running both programs, just make sure
you don't have Spybot set to auto install updates, If you do, disable
your internet connection before you open it, change the setting to
manual update, then go look for the updates, and right-click, exclude
"integrated tools". Meanwhile, I'll get on actually emailing them
about that, and posting this to the right group! I still like Sygate
better than Zone Alarm or Black Ice, and I like Spybot better than
just about anything, just a weird glitch in the update I think.
