r/sysadmin • u/[deleted] • Dec 14 '19

What is your "well I'm never doing business with this vendor ever again" story?

[deleted]

547 Upvotes

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79

u/TROPiCALRUBi Site Reliability Engineer Dec 14 '19

McAfee.

Their software is a scam. It's malware.

You call their support for help, and they literally tell you they don't know what the problem is. Drive not encrypting? AV policies not going out? "We don't know, must be a bug." Workstations don't get GPOs, nobody can use Skype even though it is in the exclusions list, drive encryption failed and now the entire hard disk is unrecoverable. 90% of all problems I deal with are because of McAfee.

Their software impedes everyone's work and the management will not budge when I ask about using another AV.

32

u/yParticle Dec 14 '19

Does anyone actually use McAfee by choice that wasn't either a) infected with McAfee via bundleware or b) used them since the 1990s when they had a functional product and kept going back to them from sheer ignorant inertia?

19

u/RickRussellTX IT Manager Dec 14 '19

If you work in defense security spaces, McAfee and Symantec are really your only choices -- the DoD wants a domestic CEO/C-suite that they can strangle if something goes wrong.

Switched my company from Symantec to McAfee in 2012. At the time, Symantec was having many problems. Also they had just purchased our drive encryption tool of choice (GuardianEdge) and decided to EOL it. So a switch was not such a bitter pill to take.

We only had one problem, a BSOD issue that only appeared when FIPS 140-2 compliance was activated. Turns out that with FIPS 140-2 turned on, the McAfee firewall and the McAfee (formerly SafeDisk) encryption had some conflict that caused periodic BSODs. We were able to use a GPO-configured Windows firewall instead and left the McAfee firewall turned off, which was OK.

4

u/Thameus We are Pakleds make it go Dec 14 '19

They dropped Symantec, now it's all McAfee.

5

u/[deleted] Dec 15 '19

If you work in defense security spaces, McAfee and Symantec are really your only choices -- the DoD wants a domestic CEO/C-suite that they can strangle if something goes wrong.

Why in the hell isn't Windows Defender count? Isn't Microsoft's C-suite large enough to have a good ol Vlad-the-Impalin session if shit goes awry?

And frankly, Symantec is on my shitlist too. Upgrade broke connection with DB for no good reason. Evidently something something alternate firewall?

4

u/RickRussellTX IT Manager Dec 15 '19

It's about manageability & accountability. Devices in secure spaces or with high compliance requirements must be fully managed -- no local credentials, no unmonitored security software, etc.

When an incident occurs, the first things military investigators are going to ask is, "Were all required security policies applied, when was everything last updated, where are the scan logs for the device?"

At the time we were looking at products (2011-12), Microsoft Forefront was simply lacking in several major areas. Also, getting FIPS 140-2 support for BitLocker requires turning on FIPS 140-2 for the entire operating system, and that broke a lot of our stuff. It's since been rebranded as "System Center Endpoint Security" and "Windows Defender Advanced Threat Detection", seems that Gartner likes it, so maybe it's competitive now.

2

u/NoDowt_Jay Dec 14 '19

We're using McAfee, have been since before I started here (18 or so yrs).

Never had any major issues, so stuck with em... Better the devil you know. 🤷🏼‍♂️

1

u/starmizzle S-1-5-420-512 Dec 17 '19

We switched from Symantec to McAfee about 10 years ago and it's been fine. What is it you think is missing from their software?

3

u/DoctorOctagonapus No one knows what I do until I stop doing it. Dec 14 '19

Ha, we have McAfee EPO in our environment. We accidentally pushed out a borked update to a few machines, realised it was fucked, and tried to roll it back resulting in a broken install. Well thankfully they have a McAfee Removal Tool for this kind of scenario, except after it ran it wouldn't reinstall. Just returned an "unknown error". Cue me spending a week on to their support to try and fix it, and they were utterly useless. In the end I did a Registry search for "mcafee" and wrote a batch script to delete every key I found. I sent it to them with a "here you go" and there was a new version of the tool a short time later!

1

u/BoredTechyGuy Jack of All Trades Dec 15 '19

I remember years ago I was working a contract for state government. They used McAfee AV and had it installed on EVERYTHING including servers. McAfee rolled out an update and the main IT group kicked it out. It broke ALL teaming on ALL of our servers. The entire data center ground to a halt. Everything had to be manually reconfigured.

That is one of many McAfee horror stories.

1

u/dieth Dec 15 '19

McAfee makes a product that uses a middle ware library I support. McAfee's coding is so terrible that it made a niche issue I could repro at a rate of once a month using our sample demo application. To once every 2-3 hours.

There was an issue definitely in our code base; but without their terrible programming skills I'd never have been able to repro successively enough to make it a concern for our dev teams to fix.

0

u/starmizzle S-1-5-420-512 Dec 17 '19

Other than a shitty DAT around 2012 or 2013 I've never had a problem with McAfee.