Are you like us, with a collection of XP workstations and Windows servers protected by Trend Micro Client-Server Messaging? Thinking about upgrading to the current version of CSM called (ironically) Worry Free Business Security? If our experience is any indication, better start worrying now.
We have used Trend for years to protect our servers and workstations. It has always seemed to do a good job without being unreasonably disruptive. We have recommended it to many other small businesses. Untill now this has been a good solution.
CSM 3.6 worked well on Vista. But when time came to upgrade this machine to Windows 7, the Microsoft Upgrade adviser told us (wrongly) that we needed to remove the client software and could reinstall it afterwards. Being a trusting soul (or idiot) I believed them. But it would not reinstall on the Windows 7 upgrade — a programatic check in the installer blocked it from running. Now what…
After much digging, and reading past press releases from months ago trumpeting support, we found that only the latest version of ‘Worry Free Business Security’ would be supporting Windows 7. But not yet, shortly before full W7 product release they were only supporting the beta. Then there was a service pack update and we could upgrade and install the client on Windows 7.
The upgrade on our Small Business Server seemed to go ok but after completion it had problems. In the end we had to remove it and reinstall (again). Now at least we had a working security server. And the upgrade would transparently upgrade the clients — this seemed to work as well.
But on the Windows 7 machine, things were not well. Stuff that worked under Vista is now breaking. After much angst it turned out that the new Trend client was blocking these programs — so we needed to put both the programs and directories into (separate) exclusion lists to continue. The interesting feature is that this did not happen with XP, only Windows 7 got the new and improved disruptions.
Like other businesses, we have a bunch of small virtual machines that run older applications that we still rely on — like our accounting programs and specialized network access tools. These had been hosted on the Vista workstation that was upgraded to Windows 7. Oh, the virtual machines continued to run fine at first. But when Trend was deployed this all crashed. Trend blocked all network access to the virtual machines and none of the exclusionary fiddling would bring it back. A response from Trend support revealed that only server virtualization was now ‘compatible’ with the client — and this required a registry hack to enable a needed feature. No mention of this in the release notes, of course or the administration docs. And both the client and security console are silent about things that they block — nothing in the logs either.
So for now, Trend has been removed from the Windows 7 machine. And of course, the virtual machines are now working. Whether Trend will fix this or not remains to be seen. But we are pretty annoyed at having to learn this the hard way. It seems to work fine on our Windows 2003/Exchange servers and the existing XP machines. But On Windows 7 it is a very different animal. Looks like it may be time to reconsider how we approach things.
