Symantec have now released a patch that fixes the issue of definitions being dated 12/31/2009. However, the patch so far is only available for those running 11.03 or 11.05. For more details read the official statement on the Symantec forums or the Symantec Knowledgebase article . Most of our Endpoint Protection Servers were running 11.0.4 (as live update does not upgrade the server console component) so we have to upgrade to 11.0.5 first. This can be seen as a good thing as 11.0.4 has the nasty feature of filling up the hard drive of the server as Symantec downloads and keeps 3 copies of the av definitions every few minutes as it tries to download definitions dated in 2010 (and fails). So far, most of the Endpoint Protection Manager upgrades have been fairly simple with straightforward instructions – a 25 minute process after the files have been downloaded (including backing up the database) but we had one site that didn’t work and we had to reinstall every single Symantec Endpoint Protection client and server by hand. Not a lot of fun.
So I’ve spent ages troubleshooting and debugging Symantec’s Endpoint Protection (SEP) version 11, MR4 – the first version that actually has a hope of working on a 64bit platform. After spending far too long configuring the various policies and tweaking various settings I was finally able to get the software installed via group policy on a testlab machine but the client would not checkin with the management server. The virus definitions were 4 months old BUT the client console was saying everything was ok. Lots of troubleshooting later and I stumbled across the definitions for the Management server – a setting that I had originally wanted to change anyway. In there I saw that the management server was listening on port 8014 and a quick telnet check from the client showed I was unable to connect. Disabling windows firewall (temporarily – this is on a testlab so the infection risk is minimal) allowed the client to check in with the server, change some settings in the console and update the virus definition dates. Finally I re-enabled the firewall, added an exception for TCP port 8014 and it all looks good, but I’ll wait to see what happens overnight for definition updates on the client. For future reference the list of communications ports for version 11 can be found at Symantecs website here or posted below in the extended entry.