On the 26th of May, I published something called “Unfun With Symantec System Recovery 2011.” This proved to be this blog’s biggest source of traffic. The other day, I discovered that it made it to the second page of Google when searching for “Symantec System Recovery 2011” and as it turns out, it’s going back and forth between the second and first page. Hilarious! It’s the first non-Symantec website listed about their product. If that doesn’t make a statement, I don’t know what does.

Since making that post, I had to install SSR’s management console because it was sold to a client. I started in the morning and one failed install and about three hours later, it was in! A few hours later, I had the client pushed to all of my VMs, software configured, ready to go. As it turns out, the management platform is kind of cool if you cut out all of the bullshit and spend some time with it. A tip: from the home page, follow the links on the left that specifically deal with SSR. Don’t even bother with the other menus. Could be worse.

Know what could not be worse, though? The fucking installation process. Yet again, I am trying to install it. The machine is a brand new, 100% fresh install of Windows Server 2008 R2, absolutely nothing installed on it. It has been about four hours. The first installation failed because the services didn’t start correctly and of course, instead of rolling back, it just left it there, broken. I tried to run the “Reconfigure” command and it bombed out twice. Between those failed attempts, I installed Symantec Endpoint Protection 12’s management console. It took fifteen minutes, start to finish, no problems whatsoever.

Unfun

I heard they're trying to get enough Dalmatians to make a coat, too. This was added after I wrote this post -- failure number three.

My point of this post, then, is to reiterate my absolute disgust with Symantec and the developers of this product for allowing it to see the light of day in its current state. The message it sends to administrators trying to deal with it is very clear: “We don’t give a shit.” Know how I know that? Because if they gave a shit, if they gave half a shit, if they cared enough to pay someone else to give a shit for them, this would not happen. To echo the thoughts of someone who commented on my original post, we sell this product because of its price point but spend so much time troubleshooting that any profit made is lost almost immediately.

This was failure number four, added after the post was published.

Nothing more to say. I would love to see my post about the shittiness of this product make it closer to the top of Google, so do everyone a favor and click here, find my post, and give it a click.