Symantec Customers Angered by Update Bug

A bug in a live update spread among Symantec’s endpoint security customers resulted in error logs piling up and rendering the solution inoperable. While the company states it is working on a fix for the issue that seems to have affected quite large numbers of users, the Register presents a different story - the hard time one of their readers has had dealing with the repeated errors.

The story sparked quite a debate on Symantec’s forums. Although the initial stories about how much damage this bug has caused are exaggerated, there still seems to be a great discrepancy in how customers and the company see things. While Symantec states only minor errors should have been reported, the quoted Registrar reader speaks of server halts and users being unable to login:

Symantec acknowledged the error-generating bug, but says the product remains functional. “This issue would have led users to see “Error 58/55″ in their SEP log files. The issue shouldn’t have done anything but generate errors — there should have been no issue with the product itself,” a spokesman said.

Richard said the problem didn’t cause problems in downloading anti-virus definitions even without applying workarounds (contrary to earlier versions of this story). Nonetheless the issue is still causing all sorts of grief. “Anti-virus updates appear to come down fine. It’s just a decomposer issue, but does that mean that anti-virus can’t scan inside archives until the problem is fixed? Symantec aren’t saying,” he said.

“However many many people are still having problems with things like the errors filling up logs and grinding servers to a halt. I personally figured something was wrong when none of my users could log on, there were temp files from live update littering the boot drive of the server and it had no free space,” Richard reports.