We're always looking for the best ways to keep our computers and children secure and safe, so this morning I decided to upgrade our antivirus software. Bad move, as you will find out...

Obviously we don't want to go into too many details about our network security, but at a high level, we run the following software;

MailFoundry - runs on our mail servers to reduce the amount of spam we get - we see about two or three a day now (we supply access to this free to all our hosting clients as well)
cloudmark desktop - puts the final clean and polish on spam - with this in place, we reduce spam to essentially zero, and more importantly, we don't see any false positives (valid emails marked as spam)
AVG Security Suite - Provides anti virus, firewall, antispyware, anti-rootkit... all you need to surf without fear
NetNanny - Stops access to inappropriate content and websites - of which there are more and more these days. We *know* that we and our children can surf without fear of accidentally accessing adult websites - can you say the same?

Anyway, back to the story. I upgraded to AVG Internet Security version 8; everything seemed to go OK, until I tried to access the internet. No go. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Both Mozilla and Internet Explorer just sat there waiting, and wouldn't show me any web content. Usually when this happens, NetNanny is sitting underneath another window, waiting for my input. But not in this case - it simply wasn't listening.

A deinstall of AVG 8 followed, quickly followed by another deinstall (the first one was completely ignored by AVG, and it restarted when I rebooted the machine). Once I had it deinstalled, I searched the internet for help, but found little help except a few posts claiming the same problem, and more than one response from AVG technical saying that AVG 8 will not work with NetNanny. Fortunately, this is incorrect!

The problem, I found, was that AVG 8 has a module called 'Web Shield', which works in a very similar way to NetNanny - and the two were conflicting. Turning off webshield in AVG didn't solve the problem, but deinstalling AVG8, reinstalling it using the Custom Install option and deselecting Web Shield did the trick. OK, I may have lost a little (minor!) level of functionality, but I think we're more than covered in that aspect.

A happy ending, and now I can continue with my day - 4 hours behind!

Labels: Business, Clients, IT Support