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wow, I can see why you are frustrated. maybe thatās the reason why Symantec got this forum? And offcourse you canāt compare Symantec with kaspersky 
I am very sorry for the experience youāve had with Symantec Customer Support. You will be contacted shortly regarding this issue, and our team will work with you to resolve the problem. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience.
My heart leapt for joy when I saw Mr. Weissā post. I kudoed him. I quickly switched the network cable from the new machine to the old, and checked my e-mail.
All I found was a survey request, including:
Please note, our records indicate your issue was resolved as of 21-Jul-2003. If this is incorrect, please contact us as soon as possible.
Setting the year aside, my first chat-session was on July 21. The result was that I agreed to run a test after the session was over. I cannot imagine any conceivable basis for the analyst marking the issue as resolved. The test was to determine if I was either an idiot or had lied about my problem.
I do not begrudge being required occasionally to prove that I am not an idiot (usually).
As for the e-mail; what sort of checking occurred, that failed to find the other chat-sessions?
And no means of contact (phone number, e-mail address, uri) was provided or suggested.
How do I un-kudo somebody (just kidding)?
Edit as of 08/06 - I PM'd Tony Weiss yesterday. He has assurred me that this e-mail was merely a coincidence rather than the response I will be receiving.
<< And no means of contact (phone number, e-mail address, uri) was provided or suggested. >>
Count yourself lucky in view of your previous experience? 8:(
Seriously you will get good support here from the Norton Staffers -- names in red -- and don't rule out that the email you got may be pure concidence and not the result of Tony W's action.
Given you log in name -- Norwegian -- are you located outside the USA and are you using a localized version of Windows and of the Norton product? I ask because we have had cases here where localities were crossed. Eg a US EN Windows with a German Norton product and the other way round.
You might also say what version of Windows you are using and which Norton Product it is since AV is in more than one.
Any information can help.
Thanks for the comments, huwyngr.
Norwegian is just one of the tags I use, now and then, here and there, going back to the heyday of CB radio (which is odd considering that Iām only 18). At least, in comparison to yours, people can pronounce it<g>.
Iām just a user, how would I know what version of Windows Iām running or what Norton product Iād installed immediately before the system-hangs began<g>?
I tried the dry, fact-based technique in another thread. I suspect it put people to sleep. Although it may simply have been that the Subject wasnāt very sexy: SCSI Timeouts when Symantec Core LC service starts.
If this Subject doesnāt work, Iām going to try āBarely Legal Teens.ā
Norwegian wrote:
[ ... ]
Iām just a user, how would I know what version of Windows Iām running or what Norton product Iād installed immediately before the system-hangs began<g>?
[ ... ]
That doen't quite fit in with the image you project in the other thread you referred to ....
So if you answer the questions I just posted here, maybe someone can help. It's up to you.
Okay, I'm sorry. I thought the humor worked since the answers were present in the other thread and I supplied a link.
NSW 2008 Prem. Installed NSW, NAV, & NS&R, but not GoBack.
WinXP-Pro 5.01.2600 SP3
Dell Precision 670 workstation
2 @ 3.4GHz XEON HT (HT enabled in BIOS)
2GB
1 SCSI Disk (Boot) + (short term only) an old 80GB PATA that I added to backup the boot drive onto.
All MS updates have been applied.
All Dell updates have been applied, including system BIOS, SCSI controller BIOS, SCSI drive firmware, optical drives firmware.
Thanks -- it wasn't that I didn't see and appreciate the humor, even before I went to the other thread, but that with the number of messages being posted and dealt with here (with the exception of your SCSI situation) anything the person with the problem does to make a starting message self-contained greatly improves the likelihood of getting a helpful answer.
And of course some of us technogeeks do have more than one computer -- I only have one desktop but it does have 3 operating systems on it. So you know what they say about people who make assumptions ..... <g>
I'm working through a problem myself with Symantec Support.
But I'm beginning to suspect it's an 'Indian Call-Centre' situation.
The last time I had to contact one of these types of call centres, it was over my ISP, and it left me feeling frustrated.
It was always a poor phone connection, they had trouble understanding my accent (and sometimes I theirs), they seemed to be reading off the computer screen going through a checklist, they had to enter my details every time I contacted them, and they were reluctant to move it further up the chain eventhough they weren't able to deal with it themselves.
We changed ISP, after two months of running around in circles, to one with a call centre in the same country as us. Within two weeks they had an engineer at our home to check for a problem. The fault was just outside our front door!
I just hope that Symantec's support apparatus is better than that, as I have very little tolerance for bad support services.
So far it does seem to be!
If you have a problem with Symantecās support system post a message here giving the details and especially any tracking number that identifies your āconnectionā. Norton here have been very good at picking up dropped balls.
I received an e-mail yesterday from an "Executive Escalations product support Analyst." We do not have an appointment yet, but the process has begun.
Thank you, Mr. Weiss.
Good news! Please let us know how it develops.
Got a phone call from Symantec Product Support in Oregon today. It raised a huge question that really bothers me.
How, exactly, was Symantec able to determine that I was in the bathroom?
Fortunately, the call was answered, and I was summoned.
The interaction was entirely satisfactory, but I donāt wish to throw any identifying information about, and I donāt want to just refer to him as āthe guy;ā so Iām going to call him āEmily.ā
Emily seemed to know what he was about and had no trouble understanding an oral description of the problem.
I was surprised to learn that he had no ready access to the online-chat information.
Emily had no interest in rushing in to a Remote Assistance session. He said that he was happy without it as long as the customer could find the Start button.
Emily blessed the concept that issuing a Start to the Symantec Core LC service was a perfectly acceptable way to test for the problem, since the alternative can take hours.
He had me do a clean boot (MS & Symantec Services only). I had told him that I thought the issued Start test was about 50% for triggering the hang, and I got lucky. First try, no perceptible hang and no logged errors; the second try yielded both.
Now we get to the bad news; he said that he had never seen or heard of anything like it.
He had me do some data collection, zip it together and send it to him.
He said that he would submit that to some technical group (I donāt recall what he called them). He said that, in the short run, they might suggest that we try some things, including some diagnostic monitoring programs.
He also mentioned fun things like starting with a clean install of Windows again, and possibly trying a beta version of a Norton 2009 product.
Emily closed by observing that his gut was telling him that this was likely to come down to a hardware issue (I think that includes BIOS).
So I am not very encouraged about my problem; but I am entirely satisfied that Symantec is doing all (or more) that it reasonable can to assist me.
If the technical group can just suggest some likely candidates for whatever system resource is involved in the hang, I can work with that.
Please do not consider any statement, or opinion, or action, that I attribute to Emily to be entirely accurate. I am summarizing and characterizing, with the inevitable consequences.
I thought I'd post an update for anyone who might find it interesting.
Emily had told me that the technical group might glance at my problem and have an insight; but if they had to do a thorough analysis, it might take an indefinite amount of time.
Unfortunately, this makes perfect sense to me. Symantec has problems that are being experienced by large numbers of customers, and problems being experienced by large customers, and 2009 products that have to be completed to go on the market.
So I have been working the problem myself. I have researched and installed a variety of debugging tools, seeking to refine the problem. I have gotten to, what I call, the smoking bullet stage (meaning that I haven't found the gun yet).
The system-hangs are triggered by SCSI_PASS_THROUGH_DIRECT controls issued by symlcsvc.exe. I infer that they have 60 sec. timeouts on them, and are timing-out. The Service will try these 3 times before apparently giving up and proceeding as though it had succeeded. I have not seen any evidence that these errors are being logged.
When the Control succeeds, it appears that it usually does so on the first try. I have, however, captured an instance wherein it failed twice before succeeding.
When it succeeds, the duration is almost 6/10ths of a second. I am really curious as to what this is doing.
Even in the Boot Log monitoring session, I have not found any other process issuing Pass-Through-Direct controls. There is another Symantec process that issues Pass-Throughs without the Direct.
So I went looking for something that uses them and, unsurprisingly, the Seagate diagnostics do. I have run them both in Foreground and Background mode, logging thousands of Pass-Through-Direct controls without error.
I no longer consider page-thrashing to be occurring. I think the high instantaneous paging rate was a consequence of queued up demand.
My next step is to try to identify any environmental differences while researching possible causes.
Bear in mind that there are no overt signs of resource shortages. There is minimal CPU activity, never less than 1.5GB of free memory (out of 2GB), and never more than ~70MB in the page file.
Here's a cap of a triple failure:
And one of a success:
Sorry about the image quality; it appears that I got resized somewhere. When I have a little time, I'll resample them to the apparent 1024 limit and replace them.
I guess the image problem was in the generated html; I've fixed that and it looks okay in the preview.
I cannot believe this post. It is a carbon copy of the sort of problems I experienced when having an online chat yesterday about my email problem with Symantec customer support.
The 'analyst' I spoke to had never heard of 'backscatter'. Whilst I am a complete novice I had learned of this problem via a Google search. I had been searching in desperation having received over 4000 bounce back spam emails on Saturday and over 500 yesterday. I had contacted my ISP on Saturday and, guess what, identical indian call centre situation and no resolution to my problem.
I contacted Symantec yesterday thinking they would have 'experts' in their help centre but received an identical conversation. In fact if I didn't know any better I would say I had spoken to the same person!
I found the next piece of information on Google also -
"According to Webroot, the biggest problem with backscatter is that the responses are essentially legitimate and so very difficult to be tagged as spam by traditional filters.
To help counter this, the company has developed a technique called Bounce Address Tag Validation to mark every message sent through its servers with a timestamp and unique cryptographic signature that cannot be duplicated.
Then any email that enters the network as a failed delivery message without this signature can be marked as spam and blocked."
Webroot appear to be a competitor of Norton based in the US.
So my question is, why are Norton not offering a similar solution to the backscatter problem??
Moved message to its own thread for better exposure.
Iām confusing myself. I had the dry, factual thread, and then I started this dumb-blond thread (which worked better). But then I posted Process Monitor caps in this thread, which has to have blown my persona out of the water.
I donāt want to start a new thread, since Iām not looking for help here any longer. I just want to keep anyone who might be interested, apprised.
If I do have to start a new thread at some point, Iām thinking that a good subject would be, āHot 16y.o. Cheerleader seeking brilliant Symantec Support Person. (Copyright Norwegian 2008)ā
To get to the report: I still donāt know whether I have a system failure or a Symantec failure. When Symantec told me that they had no record of anything like it, it seemed likely that the problem was elsewhere. But nothing else seems to trigger it, including every diagnostic test Iāve tried so far.
Dell has stepped up. They sent me a new XP-pro reinstallation disk (SP2 rather than my originalās SP1a). I did another clean install (actually two, the boot volume was assigned G: on the first try. That probably shouldnāt have bothered me, butā¦) and got exactly the same result.
They have now offered me a new motherboard. I have a parts-only warranty, and have never replaced a motherboard. Iāve done almost everything else you can do inside a case, so Iām not afraid of it; but itās a lot of careful work. They havenāt told me, yet, why they think it might be the motherboard. If they have any sort of rationale, so be it. If they donāt, Iāll vote for replacing the drive and cable first.
I had expressed a wistful interest in what the IOCTL-SCSI-PASS-THROUGH-DIRECT control was doing, and Symantec has not been forthcoming (although they havenāt said that they wonāt tell me). I figured that there was a distinct possibility that it was a secret. Symantec is, after all, in the security business; and Pass-Through controls are a good way to make it harder on hackers.
Then, last Friday, I figured out what it was doing, at least in general. SCSI drives have a tendency to be weird; and drives behind RAID controllers often refuse SMART controls. symlcsvc, when it starts up, issues a SMART-GET-VERSION control to the boot drive. If that succeeds, it issues a SMART-RCV-DRIVE-DATA.
The Dell always rejects the Get-Version control with āInvalid Device Requestā. That appears to be what triggers the Pass-Through control (strong inference). So itās just an alternate means of accessing SMART data, and unlikely to be a secret.
I communicated that to Symantec, and they have promised me a response.
I have also bundled the whole thing up and submitted it to Seagate for advice.
Meanwhile, someone with a similar machine (Precision 380) and a SCSI boot drive, has posted on the dry, factual thread; saying that they have the same problem.
Iām not alone anymore<g>.
I also had a problem with tech support, when I first installed systemworks, save&restore kept complaining it was on a trial period and some features were disabled, but there was no activate option available. The response I got, about a week later, was that I needed to go to the help menu and click activate... which I had said in the original email wasn't available.
Of course by the time they responded to my problem at all, the save&restore service and the GUI front-end finally communicated that it was registered and activated, and it had stopped complaining. All it took was seven or so reboots while I figured out why my computer kept crashing (bad RAM it turned out). Oh, and running live update manually seemed to finally solve the problem, now that I think about it.
Here was the response I got, which had the original problem at the end. Note that I said the activate option wasn't available, yet the solution they copied&pasted off the website for me was to use the activate option, and I said nothing about trial period expired...
Incident: {removed}
Response ({removed}) - 08/20/2008 11:26 PM
Hello ---,
Thank you for contacting Norton Support.
I understand from your message that you receive "Trial period expired" message.
We have performed required steps on our server. To resolve the issue
you are facing, I suggest you to activate the program and check for the
issue. Follow the steps provided below to activate the program:
1. Open Norton Save and Restore.
2. Click on Option > Activation.
3. Follow the on screen instruction to complete the activation.
4. Close all the window and then check for the issue.
Thank you for your patience and co-operation. Thank you for your patience and understanding in this regard.
Regards,
{removed}
Norton Support
Disclaimer Note:
This message (including any attachments) is intended only for the use
of the individual to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended
recipient, please do not follow any instructions provided within this
message. Any instructions or offers contained within this message are
for a specific person, system configuration, location, and situation.
Following these instructions may adversely affect your system if you
are not the intended recipient.
If you have received this communication in error, please notify us
immediately by telephone and (i) destroy this message if a facsimile or
(ii) delete this message immediately if this is an electronic
communication. You are hereby notified that any use, dissemination,
distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited.
Thank you.
Customer (----) - 08/20/2008 02:00 AM
Save & Restore says I'm running on a trial period, but there is no
activate option in the help menu. The rest of systemworks is activated,
including norton antivirus, but save & restore has no option to activate, it just keeps complaining I'm on trial period.
(changed to comic sans because thats what I think of the email I got. Heres my response to them:)
Well, as I originally said, there was no activate option available,
and it wasn't "trial period expired" it was "you are running on a
trial product."
I would appreciate it if you had read my original message though, it
is annoying to receive advice that I had already said wasn't working.
However the problem fixed itself somehow after a recent' live-update
patch, there is no more problem.
ShosuroKenshin wrote:
I also had a problem with tech support, when I first installed systemworks, save&restore kept complaining it was on a trial period and some features were disabled, but there was no activate option available. The response I got, about a week later, was that I needed to go to the help menu and click activate... which I had said in the original email wasn't available...
Hi ShosuroKenshin,
Thank you for letting us know about this issue. I know that getting a stock answer is never a fun customer service experience, and I apologize if you have had a poor experience. I have communicated the agent's information to our team to follow-up and address this problem promptly. Again, I'm very sorry. Thank you for your help in letting us know about this service failure.