Which is to say, me.
A few of the systems here at Casa de Bit have run out of Norton subscription. Our systems involve removing Norton outright and going with a complete re installation, because of the way the licensing works. So, I’ve gotta deal with that. Whatever else can be said about the process, it is NEVER pain free.
I have backup routines to re-map and re-balance. The desktops (Five of them at the moment, if you don’t count the LINUX boxes) all dump nightly to the backup server, which has some fairly sizable disks in it. The desktops all have 20gb drives, except for Panther, my big desk which has a 30gb disk. Once they all backup to the server, the server then tape backups itself. This usually works well, but I’ve been seeing soem timing issues, where the anti-virus scans at the desktop level tends to slow the backup processes down to a crawl. And the auto-updates from Microsoft, too, come to think of it; when the systems reboot following an update, the whole thing gets screwy.
Donna has finally decided to use Thunderbird, after spending a half hour wading through spam sucked up greedily by Outlook. Been telling her for years outlook was crap. NOW, she listens. So, I’ve gotta make arrangements for that, now, too.
And I have a power supply to replace on Bear, one of the two file and print servers I have online. The one that’s in there is getting pretty dust loaded… it’s been running non-stop for six years, give or take. I may be able to clean it up for re-use, but the fastest way to deal with this stuff is to put the shelf spare online and clean the old one out and revamp it for future use at leisure. Power supplies are cheap, anymore.
I may even have time to deal with a few outstanding issues on the Blog.
Update: As expected, Panther wigged out when I told it to uninstall Norton. It chugged on the thing for an hour and then proceeded to calmly inform me that my INSTALL had failed, it reinstalled all the stuff it spent an hour deleting, and then it advised me that it wanted to have a chat with the folks back and Symantec.. Well, the beep with that.
I killed all the Symantec processes manually, hacked the registry free of all vestiges of Norton, and Symantec, rebooted, and then blew up all the files under those titles and uses. I likely didn’t get all the files, but I was pretty resigned to the automatic process not getting them all, anyway.
I’ve loaded PCTOOLS AV for now. It may not be the best, but it’s free, and it uninstalls itself when I ask it to.
Add-on. Now, I have to go see what’s wrong with Mom’s installation of VISTA. Other than it being Vista, I mean.
