Finally got it working

I was finally able to get things working again on Friday. We basically went without monitoring and filtering from Nov 6 through Dec 21, or 45 days.

 

Given how these things go, I'm somewhat confident this was the fix, but not 100% sure.

 

Since I'm running windows 7 on the children's computers, I had installed Windows Live Essentials a long time ago. Part of the package has integration for Parental controls with windows 7. I first uninstalled NF (with reboot afterwards). I then went into control panel, uninstall, and then selected Windows Live Essentials 2011. I then clicked <Remove one or more Windows Live programs>. I then selected the parent controls (can't remember exactly how this showed up). I then reinstalled NF.

 

The key indicator that things were starting to work is when in the child's account I click <show house rules> from the NF system tray, we finally started seeing some rules. I then attempted going to known blocked sites. Note - this worked immediately for 1 child's account, but not for the other. It took some time before the 2nd child's started getting blocked as it should have. I also started seeing logged activity on the NF web page.

 

The delayed logging with the 2nd child kind of bothered me, as well as seeing the infamous spawning of NF icons in the system tray (ccSvcHst and ccsvchst.exe processes). It only got up to 3, but is back down to 1 (must have had a reboot since Friday).

 

If this is indeed the case, the question still remains - what did Norton do with the latest update back in early November to break things.

 

I hope this helps others.

 

 

Hi,

Glad to hear that things are working for you now. In terms of what happened, we did a major release early November which caused issues for our service. We've been working diligently since then to resolve them and hope that they have been for the majority of our users. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any issues.

 

Regards,

Albert

Well,

 

Unfortunately your fix didn't work for me.  My problems seems to be during the "configuring the computer process" when assigning norton accounts to Windows 7 users.  When I configure users and try to finalize the configuration, it promps me to sign-in to Norton Family.  I use the same same email account and parent password and hit enter.  Norton responds by asking for Parent sign-in, AGAIN.  This is where I seem to be stuck in a continual loop (Parent Sign-in).  When I cancel out, everything appear OK but Online family fails to load any rules.  This is the message I get when I cancel "an error occured while trying to update your settings.  Please try again later."

 

It's been over a month since my Norton Family has worked.  I'm working around this issue by using OpenDNS.  It doesn't have nearly the capability of Norton Family but it works.

 

I'm hopeful Norton will get "their act together" with Norton Family.  It's hard to believe a global company like Norton hasn't put the right mix of resources to solve the Norton Family issues.

 

 

 

Steve


se_mason wrote:

Well,

 

Unfortunately your fix didn't work for me.  My problems seems to be during the "configuring the computer process" when assigning norton accounts to Windows 7 users.  When I configure users and try to finalize the configuration, it promps me to sign-in to Norton Family.  I use the same same email account and parent password and hit enter.  Norton responds by asking for Parent sign-in, AGAIN.  This is where I seem to be stuck in a continual loop (Parent Sign-in).  When I cancel out, everything appear OK but Online family fails to load any rules.  This is the message I get when I cancel "an error occured while trying to update your settings.  Please try again later."

 

It's been over a month since my Norton Family has worked.  I'm working around this issue by using OpenDNS.  It doesn't have nearly the capability of Norton Family but it works.

 

I'm hopeful Norton will get "their act together" with Norton Family.  It's hard to believe a global company like Norton hasn't put the right mix of resources to solve the Norton Family issues.

 

 

 

Steve


Steve, that is exactly the issue I was having. I have Katie Qiu remote in and watch while I was working on it. Unless she did something in the background on the server side, it either came down to luck, or MSL Parental controls interferring. I sure hope they get it fixed.

Albert,

 

It's still not fixed for me.  Please see my posts in the 'Norton Family - sign in authentication failed thread'.  I am still having these issues after almost two months.

 

When can I expect a fix?

 

Keith

 

 

ABERTCWANG WROTE:

 

Re: Finally got it working
 

‎12-23-2012 06:00 PM

Hi,

Glad to hear that things are working for you now. In terms of what happened, we did a major release early November which caused issues for our service. We've been working diligently since then to resolve them and hope that they have been for the majority of our users. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any issues.

 

Regards,

Albert

 

Thanks a million! I had tried endless builds and uninstall/reinstalls without success. I noticed that I could clearly log in to the server again and my client (children's computers) were able to connect again to the server, but I could not figure out why they would not report any activity until I followed your steps. I also had to uninstall Windows Live parental controls (I took out all Windows Live tools), and I had to reinstall NF and then log in as the child and take several attempts to read the house rules. Once I got there I tested and tested and finally got some activity to report back to the server.

 

It is sad but true that after all these headaches for a huge user pool, the solution comes from user to user in a forum! Why doesn't Norton send instructions on this to the user base?  I will place this info in the other threads I am posting to about this issue.

 

Thanks again!

Ron

You're welcome.  It's too bad Syamtec isn't investing the resources to have solved such a large-scope problem instead of having users vacate or try to figure it out themselves.

 

I'm still having some issues this morning. Kids can't get to approved sites, and the server side is down this morning. Not sure why they can't get to the approved websites, as I thought Norton designed it such that the rules on the client-side were stand-alone (cached).