Liveupdate/AOL broadband problem

[Mitchell Regenbogen]

Just finished updating my friend's WinXP machine, and noticed that while
she had a current Norton Anit-Virus subscription her virus definitions
were dated August 2003. When I tried to run LiveUpdate I kept getting an
error saying that it could not connect to the server, as if there was no
Internet connection. This poor sould connects to the Internet with AOL
DSL through Verizon. Once connected/logged-in through the AOL "dialer,"
the Internet connection seems fine. Every Internet application I can
throw at it works, EXCEPT LiveUpdate. So her virus definitions hadn't
updated in almost a year. I upgraded her from the 2002 to 2004 version,
upgraded her AOL from 8.0 to 9.0, did all the Windows Updates, etc.
Still, everything works EXCEPT LiveUpdate. I went through ALL of the
suggestions on the Symantec website. (One thing I did notice is that the
AOL DSL connection is so dumbed down that even the Ethernet card status
screen does not show an Internet connection, even though there is one
through that card, and everything works, EXCEPT of course Liveupdate.)

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[Brendan DJ Murphy]

Every Internet application I can
throw at it works, EXCEPT LiveUpdate.

The first thing i would check are your firewall settings.
( I hope you have a firewall ;-) )

Brendan

 

[Mitchell Regenbogen]

The first thing i would check are your firewall settings.
( I hope you have a firewall ;-) )

Not that I can tell, unless AOL has one in its well-covered innards. If I
didn't hate AOL enough before, I do now.

 

[polly]

Not that I can tell, unless AOL has one in its well-covered innards. If I
didn't hate AOL enough before, I do now.

the poor woman is suffering from enough disadvantages from the start i.e.
aol & norton. teach her how to do the manual update. It is easy and normally
provides better/more timely protection. Today for example the manual
download database is dated July 31 whereas the auto file is dated July 28th.
There have been times in the past where 3 days slippage could be crucial.

I have to flush many machines that were 'protected' by norton, reliance on
their live update is deadly

here is the link, put it in her favourites

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/download/pages/US-N95.html

 

[Mitchell Regenbogen]

the poor woman is suffering from enough disadvantages from the start
i.e. aol & norton. teach her how to do the manual update. It is easy
and normally provides better/more timely protection. Today for example
the manual download database is dated July 31 whereas the auto file is
dated July 28th. There have been times in the past where 3 days
slippage could be crucial.

I have to flush many machines that were 'protected' by norton,
reliance on their live update is deadly

here is the link, put it in her favourites

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/download/pages/US-

N95.html

That's veryy good advice, actually. But I STILL would like to figure
out why Liveupdate is the only application that doesn't see the Internet
connection.

 

[polly]

That's veryy good advice, actually. But I STILL would like to figure
out why Liveupdate is the only application that doesn't see the Internet
connection.

It's possible to while away long periods of time trying to get norton to
function correctly, it has many flaws and a high failure rate. Your time
would be better spent uninstalling the thing and downloading Avast or AVG

both of those alternative outperform norton and tend to not go wonky!

 

[tim]

I have to flush many machines that were 'protected' by norton, reliance on
their live update is deadly

Reliance on ANY anti virurs is deadly. You'd be better off teaching
users not to click willy nilly on every email attachment that comes
their way.

 

[polly]

Reliance on ANY anti virurs is deadly. You'd be better off teaching
users not to click willy nilly on every email attachment that comes
their way.

I have learnt over all these years that the capacity of the average computer
user to sabotage their own machine is infinite and beyond cure besides, if
they all stopped I would have to go and get another job!

P

 

[kurt wismer]

polly wrote:
[snip]

I have learnt over all these years that the capacity of the average computer
user to sabotage their own machine is infinite and beyond cure besides, if
they all stopped I would have to go and get another job!

this is the "users never learn" argument, and it is provably false -
just ask them for their name, address, and credit card number... they
learned not to do stupid things like handing that info out willy nilly,
they can learn not to click on things willy nilly too...

the unfortunate reality is that advice to "teach your users not to do
X" is often given to people who are unwilling or unable to actually
'teach'... teaching is generally pretty far outside of an admin's or IT
staffer's skill-set (they can _show_ their users things, but that's
quite a bit different than _teaching_ their users things)... teaching
is a rather specialized people-skill and when one doesn't have it
successfully teaching one's users not do do X will take a considerable
amount of work...