Clients out-of-date but updates succeeding

Question

Hi everyone,

It seems we have a company-wide problem since this morning. We run Sophos ESC 9.0, on a mix of XP and 7 client machines - we do not use the management console, these are all standalone installations contacting Sophos directly for updates.

As of this morning, Windows is flagging the software as out-of-date. The client itself is quite happy - no indication of update problems. Further investigation of update logs shows only the "items skipped" entries - in other words, normal termination of the update check where no new updates are found.

Product Info from the client:

SAV: 9.0.6

Detection: 3.15.0

Detection Data: 4.61G

Virus Data Date: 03/01/2011 (? No virus data update since early Jan?)

HIPS rules: 3.2.0

HIPS config: 1.0.4

Last Updated: 05/01/2011

Sophos AutoUpdate: 2.5.4

Last Checked for Updates: 07/02/2011 14:10:34

Update Status: Success

Any help or advice on this issue would be very much appreciated.

PS - offtopic observation - all buttons on this forum have "invisible" text in Firefox. I cannot see the "new topic", "reply" etc. button text - just empty borders, until I drag a selection over them.

Thanks everyone,

Darren.

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Darren_IFI · Accepted Answer

I called support this morning, and the very helpful chap was able to figure out the problem. It seems that a file called "status.xml" isn't being properly updated - even when auto-updates succeed. We removed this file, ran an update manually, and now Windows is happy again.

As mentioned, this happened on lots of machines - a mix of Windows 7 and XP clients. The file can be found in:

C:\ProgramData\Sophos\AutoUpdate\data\status (Windows 7 and probably Vista)

C:\Program Files\Sophos\AutoUpdate\data\status (Windows XP)

Deleting the status.xml file in this folder and running an update manually, will remove the out-of-date warning.

I'm guessing the problem isn't too widespread based on a lack of replies to this topic, but this may help some people out there - and reduce load on the Sophos support guys :) The support experience was a good one though, which is always nice. Kudos to Sophos UK support for being on the ball and knowing their stuff.