Bill Robertson's Blog

Community Server and its "Poison" to McAfee

I came home tonight to another automatic virus scan of my machine.  Yes, it's McAfee, so there is problem one.  Problem two is an issue that's being going on with me between Community Server and McAfee anti-virus software in general for nearly a year.  Community Server has some great looking blog skins that can be pulled over with a default install.  This works well for visually diversifying the plethora of blogs running CS.

One of those skins has the name "PoisonIvy".  It's a nice looking skin, but not quite sure where the name comes from.  When the skin was first released internally everyone's McAfee [default in-office install] recognized it as a virus and quarantined it.  Any text file named PoisonIvy is delete by McAfee.  It would be great if it were a virus, but

It is NOT a virus!

It has the same html as all the other skins.  This a testament to the crack anti-virus team developing McAfee's virus engine.  I sure hope no one renames the virus to anything other than PoisonIvy.  They aren't even looking at the contents of the file, only the filename.  I've contacted McAfee about this and what I could do to remove that "definition" from my list or exempt that directory.  I'm paraphrasing their response: "No, you can't, our software sucks and you are a fool for buying it".

Now that McAfee has completely confirmed they won't do anything about it, I must shift my focus back to the Community Server team.  The "Enterprise Version" provides a workaround.

CS team, pretty, pretty please with a cherry on top rename the PoisonIvy skin.  It gets worse every week because I have more CS sites on my machine.  I've spent the last hour and a half running SVN cleanup on directories and re pulling so I could work.  I'm sure there are other people in the wild downloading CS for the first time and McAfee pukes up at them.  Do those users give up and move to a competitor and tell others CS has a virus embedded in it?

I will personally hand deliver no more than 3 beers to any CS developer in Dallas that would get this changed.  This offer stands for any developers when they come to the Dallas office.

Comments

Brent said:

I hate to be a smartass, but why don't you dump McAfee?

# June 16, 2007 9:39 PM

Bill Robertson said:

You're correct.  I've since dumped McAfee, but I don't have the power to prohibit McAfee from selling their software and want to minimized conflicts between other people who have purchased (or cracked) McAfee and those using Community Server.

And I know you don't "hate" to be a smart ass.  You probably enjoyed it a little.  And there's nothing wrong with that! :)

# June 18, 2007 10:56 AM

Rob said:

Bill, can you tell me what version of McAfee you had this issue with?  Were you guys running > 8.0.0?

# July 10, 2007 9:09 AM

Bill Robertson said:

At home I'm running Security Center 7.2 with Virus Scann 11.2.  There really isn't a "Help -> About" menu option I can hit.

# July 10, 2007 7:52 PM

Rob said:

I was just wondering.  My workplace uses McAfee, and I was trying to recreate the issue with Enterprise 8.5.0 and was unable to do it.  I was hoping to use this for projects where I knew in advance I wasn't going to make a deadline.  Rename config file to PoisonIvy, blame McAfee, and finish project under new 'that stupid McAfee' time extension!!!

# July 11, 2007 7:41 AM
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