Somewhere along the line, I made the "strategic" decision (although at the time, it didn't feel strategic) to install Mandrake rather than RedHat on 4 of our servers. No big deal, right? I mean, when you strip away all of the bells and whistles, Mandrake is pretty much RedHat is pretty much Mandrake.
4 servers. DNS servers. 2 internal, 2 external. Mandrake.
Fastforward about 6 months, and suddenly one of the external DNS servers is now also our failover Sendmail server. I had a few weenie-type issues getting the commercial version of Sendmail to run on it. Sendmail's technical support, while making sure that I understood that they didn't support Mandrake, were more than helpful, and in a very short period of time, it was working.
As part of the Sendmail installation, I also installed Trend Micro's Interscan VirusWall. It's got all sorts of scanning shit, but all we use is the SMTP stuff. I spend more time disabling what we don't use than getting the rest of the set-up configured.
And merrily we rocked along.
After a while, the Security Team contacts me. Interscan is supposed to automatically download and update the virus files on a nightly basis. It's working perfectly on the primary MTA, but on the secondary (Mandrake, external DNS), it's not. And they can't figure out the error message. I tell them that I'm well aware that it's not automatically updating, because I've been manually updating it for the past 6 months or so. I tell them to contact Trend Micro and get it resolved because I'm tired of manually updating the thing.
Once Trend Micro heard "Mandrake", that was the end of the discussion. They only support RedHat, and absolutely refused to discuss the matter any further.
Now, I understand the asshole concept better than most. Hell, I wrote a few chapters myself. And I also understand the magnitude of providing technical support across several different platforms. But refusing to even discuss the matter with us? Refusing to even walk through a configuration file or two and to at least let us know that we had set up the machine properly? That's inexcusable.
Trend Micro lost themselves a customer today. We were evaluating alternatives within an hour of their refusal.
And I'm 50% finished with a Perl script that'll autmatically download the updates from their site and apply them.
Interscan may not be willing to discuss the matter, but I'll be damned if I can't fix what they won't.
And they can have my Perl script, too. Right after they smooch my lilly-white ass.
Posted from exitwound.org, comment here.
