Symantec Norton Security group has been in my experience the worst in providing even just basic informational support. I had a question that was fairly easy for a customer and it's been a week and I've not received a response from them. Not even an automated response was sent back as a notification that the email was received - nothing. One week now and they've not replied. That is pathetic.

A previous post http://remotesupportsoftware.blogspot.com/2005/12/november-19th-2005-at-454-am-this-new.html highlighed reports how their software at the time had difficulty removing the W32/Sdbot-ADD worm.

Symantec products, in my opinion, aren't that good either, too pricey, often add to a problem, and in most cases I find them slow. For example, the Norton Antivirus software is a computer CPU and memory hog! While working on a system to resolve another issue, I'll turn off that program just to allow the computer to work faster so I could complete the original problem.

In the case of Norton security, it IS THE PROBLEM. What a piece of junk that program is. It's worse than Microsoft Vista's UAC (User Access Control). I had to work out a bunch of issues for a customer that was unable to send email because Norton security was blocking Outlook, yes Outlook, from sending email . Norton Security is a horrible joke to play on people.

Tags: symantec security,software, symantec,security

Sonicwall Received notify: INVALID_ID_INFO

Sonicwall Received notify: INVALID_ID_INFO

I wanted to add this little piece of knowledge to the online community and hope it's found useful for someone. While working with some Sonicwall firewalls, I needed to create a VPN tunnel between two units. It was a basic and simple VPN that was mostly comprised of default settings. The VPN tunnel wasn't coming up for me and in the log there was the message: Received notify: INVALID_ID_INFO This was an interesting message and it really had nothing to do with the identification of the tunnel or addresses or, SA name or description, or even with the remote firewall's names or descriptions. It was caused by having both of the Sonicwalls in Aggressive mode for Phase 1 of the tunnel establishment. Switching both to Main mode solved the problem. The setting can be found in the VPN policy Proposals Tab.

Once this change was done, the VPN came right up and the two sites were communicating with each other. This is a setting that can catch some one off-guard and the message that inserted into the log can be deceiving. It can make one think the the name of something is incorrect. Sonicwall's support can have you running in circles too.

As a reminder:

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