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Clients out-of-date but updates succeeding

Darren_IFI

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As of this morning, Windows is flagging the software as out-of-date.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.

:8871


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  • 0

    This is an interesting problem to hear and one I've seen a few times personally.

    Something I've been a little concerned about when using standalone clients is that the actual main updates that occur at least once a month on managed clients don't seem to happen on standalone clients when specifically updating direct from the Sophos databank only and I've mentioned this many times to support. It seems that the Sophos databank only does a major update every 90 days or so but does the minor (IDE) updates regularly. Problem with this approach and most especially with Vista and 7 clients is that the windows safety centre starts moaning at Sophos being out of date when it's around 60 days old (sometimes as early as 45 days). It does this by watching for a particular file date/time stamp and I believe that the file is still vdl.dat. This file is in each major update but obviously not in the minors so can hang around way beyond 60 days before being replaced. Nothing's actually wrong, just the system not informing windows it's updating routinely. It's interesting to hear the TS answer that's posted here, removing the XML file fixes the problem. Yes it does because it causes the AU to download the entire package again and hence update the vdl.dat file but problem will simply happen again in 45 to 60 days so it's not a solution.

    Sophos, please note this and do something, problem's been around a good couple of years now and it's about time you tackled this! It ONLY happens when CLIENTS ONLY update direct from the Sophos databanks.

    Matt

    :9063
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  • 0

    This is an interesting problem to hear and one I've seen a few times personally.

    Something I've been a little concerned about when using standalone clients is that the actual main updates that occur at least once a month on managed clients don't seem to happen on standalone clients when specifically updating direct from the Sophos databank only and I've mentioned this many times to support. It seems that the Sophos databank only does a major update every 90 days or so but does the minor (IDE) updates regularly. Problem with this approach and most especially with Vista and 7 clients is that the windows safety centre starts moaning at Sophos being out of date when it's around 60 days old (sometimes as early as 45 days). It does this by watching for a particular file date/time stamp and I believe that the file is still vdl.dat. This file is in each major update but obviously not in the minors so can hang around way beyond 60 days before being replaced. Nothing's actually wrong, just the system not informing windows it's updating routinely. It's interesting to hear the TS answer that's posted here, removing the XML file fixes the problem. Yes it does because it causes the AU to download the entire package again and hence update the vdl.dat file but problem will simply happen again in 45 to 60 days so it's not a solution.

    Sophos, please note this and do something, problem's been around a good couple of years now and it's about time you tackled this! It ONLY happens when CLIENTS ONLY update direct from the Sophos databanks.

    Matt

    :9063
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