Did You Know? – Episode #2

I’ve managed to get a recording together for a second episode of the Did You Know podcast. This time we have Isaak along for the ride, and he brings some more interesting facts about the human body, and more.

On a side note, please forgive the production quality. I was experimenting a bit too much with this episode. First both of us were recording live using the same microphone so editing turned out to be difficult, and then I was working with new software which I still am not used to. Anyway, enjoy!

[Download iTunes File]

ESET Antivirus (NOD32) for Mac OS X Update

On December 6th I wrote a short little post about ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 Beta for Mac OS X. On January 08 2010 they released an updated build which has the following changelog:

- Fixed GUI failure that had occurred in some cases during configuration imports
- System font warnings no longer display
- Added advanced “About” window and “Splash” screen
- Added information windows about detected and cleaned infiltrations
- Support for selection of multiple items from lists

So compared to my last post, have any of the issues I addressed changed? No they haven’t. So let me go through my experiences with this new build.

USB and Other Removable Drives

When attempting to eject (or unmount) a removable USB drive, you get a message saying “The disk “XXXX” wasn’t ejected because one or more programs may be using it.
To eject the disk immediately, click on the Force Eject button.”

The you can either Cancel or Force Eject.

This issue only occurs when running NOD32, otherwise drives work just fine. Also in certain situations the mounting of drives including network shares can be quite time consuming.

TrueCrypt

I am a heavy TrueCrypt user. When attempting to mount a TrueCrypt volume (I mostly use container or file based volumes) the following error message occurs:

“hdiutil: attach failed – Permission denied”

I also mentioned this error in my previous blog post, and also submitted a ticket to ESET about this. No response.

More…

Of course there are other things we could talk about as well. I still strongly desire that there be a way to remove the system menu icon. There’s already a Dock icon and there should be a way to disable either one of them. At least a way to disable the menu bar icon as it just takes unnecessary space.

Also disabling the real-time protection still does not require administrator authentication. Even if you are logged in as an administrator user you should still be prompted for your password to disable real-time protection.

And one more thing, the uninstaller is not user friendly. Which of course I was forced to do again as without TrueCrypt I’m toast. The uninstaller actually launched a command line script and you’re prompted for your password from a terminal window. This is not something I would expect a normal user to do, and it would be a 15min task to bundle that script into a package just like the installer. Even an applescript bundle is better than that.

So that’s it. I still say good on ESET for doing this, but c’mon, listen to the people who actually use and sell your product.

Update [2010-01-18]

Just got a response from ESET on these issues, and quoting it here:

Thank you for your feedback on our EAV4 beta version for Mac OS. The updates installation package was released to quickly address some most important issues. It is not meant as the next beta version release which will contain more fixes.
Several issues mentioned in your articles are already known to us (dock and menu icon, TrueCrypt error) and will be fixed in the future.
…..

Thanks for the response, and hopefully once the TrueCrypt problem is fixed I can continue testing the product.

R1Soft Versus Bacula

When implementing a backup system for a network of Windows servers I evaluated R1Soft and Bacula, and thought it might be nice to share some thoughts here on the amazing blog!

So, the main differences. As of now R1Soft is $348 (up from $180 two weeks ago). Bacula is free and completely open source with an option of commercial support.
R1Soft has a very nice web interface for managing all the systems, and setup configuration is extremely easy.

Also the Bacula server (storage and director) component is not supported on Windows. Only on Linux/UNIX systems. But it works as that’s what I’m running currently with Bacula 3.0.3a.

Bacula has many of the same features as R1Soft, but the fact that everything is configured through text configuration files can be a turn-off for some people as it is quite a learning curve. If you just want to get it done without a fuss, R1Soft is your choice. In my case I decided to save a few thousand dollars by learning Bacula and implementing it.

Also Bacula stores the backups in monster volume files while R1Soft uses a more file based structure which I do prefer. Although performance does seems to actually be better with Bacula during a backup.

Overall I decided to go to Bacula solely on price. If R1Soft was still at $180/agent I would have seriously considered going with them because of official Windows server support and awesome web gui interface. But free software won again, despite the initial challenge of learning a new configuration file specification.

I might have to teach a course now to make some ROI for learning the stuff.

Did You Know? – Episode #1

This is of course our first episode of the Did You Know podcast. It’s goal is very simple, we just have not completely determined it yet. So for now it’s for you to gain a better insight into the truth behind the routine curtain.

Read the rest of this entry »

2010

Yes, it’s been 2010 for a little bit. And yes, I do just want to write a short little blurb about it.

2009 was good.      BUT we can do A LOT BETTER!
And so my hope is that’s what 2010 will be about. A focused direct energy on something that is extremely important. Much like a laser beam. And we’ll see what happens.