McAfee Unreachable - Tin Foil Time?

11/6/02 | Hi Tech Red Neck

[HiTech RedNeck]

This is the second night in a row that I hit the instant update button in my Mcafee VirusScan, newly installed after a hardware crash on Windows 98, and in the middle of the downloads the process froze. Then when I go to try to ping www.mcafee.com (which I could reach before the problem) it says network unreachable! I can ping other sites, I can freep, but no mcafee. Is there maybe a McAfee-DDOS-attack virus out there? (DDOS=distributed denial of service) My ISP is Ameritech (DSL).

[HiTech RedNeck]

This is the second night in a row that I hit the instant update button in my Mcafee VirusScan, newly installed after a hardware crash on Windows 98, and in the middle of the downloads the process froze. Then when I go to try to ping www.mcafee.com (which I could reach before the problem) it says network unreachable! I can ping other sites, I can freep, but no mcafee. Is there maybe a McAfee-DDOS-attack virus out there? (DDOS=distributed denial of service) My ISP is Ameritech (DSL).

[Mike-o-Matic]

I can't ping either (from Charter's network) but I can visit the website. It is possible that McAfee doesn't operate a ping daemon to prevent ping-flood attacks on them, or something similar. Note: IANASE (I am not a security expert) so I'm speculating here. Anyway... try your download again in a little while.

Good luck!

[beckett]

I switched over to Norton some time ago after I began to get a whiff of trouble at McAfee. I don't think the company is all that well financed these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the service problems you are experiencing, rather than being strictly technical, are ultimately related to cash flow problems at the company.

[w1andsodidwe]

Well my Mcafee updated tonight just like it does every wednesday night. No problem.

[NewRomeTacitus]

Try PC-Cillin from Trend Micro. Not only does it stay ahead of the weirdness they usually have virus definition updates ready for you to impliment upon boot-up two or more times per week. Outstanding! McAfee, by comarison, is infrequent and Norton only wants to be bothered on Wednesday afternoons. Combine this with basic Zone Alarm and you're covered.

[bigfootbob]

Or buy a Mac

[lelio]

A better tool to diagnose problems (as like the other poster said they could block pings) is "traceroute" (or "tracert" for you NT people). It shows you the routers along the way to the destination site.
Course these probes could be blocked too. Its a pretty handy tool and you should be able to find it somewhere for Windows.

[Ford Fairlane]

I run Esafe - no problems ever, and they don't charge for updates - stops every virus dead

[JoJo Gunn]

I mean no offense to any McAfee users, because I was a user too, until i switched to Norton NIS, mainly for the firewall. It turns out that McAfee was so unstable for my particular machine, an HP, though HP issues McAfee, go figure.

What I hated most was the lack of customer service, and make no mistake, Norton might be a molecule better, but the thing I hated most was the slap in the face in the guise of "Lori".


http://ast00001.egain.net/assistant/bot/McAfee

[Smogger]

Dump all of those programs and get yourself some AVG from wwww.grisoft.com.

It is thorough and has a nice small fast virus shield that doesn't lag or crash your system.. EVER! Automatically updates itself and BEST OF ALL ITS FREEE!

[BlazinMiller]

Home - Norton Anti-Virus

Corp.- Hands down macfee.

The corp version is very light and is stable as hell.

Macfee home version has crashed 2 out of 4 machines before I laughed at it all the way into the garbage.

[Moonmad27]

I just now downloaded McAfee virus scan online - worked fine, thank goodness!