Letting it ride

Since my mom introduced me to Zicam at Christmas I have felt the onset of what felt to be illness at least a half a dozen times.  Each time I started feeling shitty I used Zicam and each time it appeared to stave off whatever was trying to get into me.  The other night I started feeling crappy once again but I decided to keep the Zicam in the box.  I started to wonder if using it all the time just puts off the inevitable.  If you don’t get full blown sick from whatever it is, your body never goes through the process of building up an immunity to it so the cycle keeps repeating.  Keep in mind this idea is totally based on my non-medical opinion.  Anyway, the symptoms started Monday and so far it hasn’t progressed, I have just felt a shade under normal.

I have had a ton of things going on at work with new things I am implementing.  After getting 3 new servers on the wire in the past few weeks I have started other projects like upgrading our Symantec AV to version 11, implementing office wide message archiving on to a 4 terabyte NAS device, working on our intranet and setting up some additional rules in Exchange to clean up after users that are either too lazy or too ignorant to empty out their sent and deleted items on a regular basis.

The symantec upgrade has been the most problematic and it was expected.  I don’t think I have ever had a Symantec AV upgrade go smoothly.  The Symantec product line has a lot of features and looks pretty but it also is a hog.  Version 11 of the AV product is the biggest pig of all.  The AV client that goes on workstations manages to mutate from a 60 meg install file to 450 meg on the workstation once it is installed!  That is ridiculous.  I also had a major problem when I pushed the AV client to our main file server, somehow it managed hose the server, cutting it off from communicating on the network which caused a boatload of problems.  Much of yesterday afternoon was spent trying to straighten that mess out.

I called up Symantec for tech support.  After navigating a phone menu and hearing the standard recording “We are experiencing above normal wait times, blah , blah, blah…” I am soon greeted by a live person.  He tells me that if I want to wait, the queue is about an hour to talk to someone.  WTF?  Instead they could put me on a call back list.  I commented “Wow your stuff must have LOTS of problems”  I got put on the call back list.  I still have not received that call.  There are some cool parts of the version 11 product.  The management is much more comprehensive and powerful although the management console requires that you run a version of Java older than the current release which again is stupid.  If you keep your Java up to snuff the Symantec console will simply not work.