I find it extremely distributing and aggravating that NAV, NIS, and N360 products require Terminal Services to be running; moreover, it is irresponsible for Norton to do it without clear and complete disclosure to the consumer. I’ve read through the User License Agreement (ULA) and the only thing mentioned, that is even close, is found under the technical support section that states, “You may choose to access certain technical support features that may be offered from within the Software, which may include live chat with technical support agent and/or assistance from a technical support agent via remote computer access … “, which may or may not be the driving factor behind requiring Terminal Services to be running.
While it could be argued that the average Norton home consumer probably does not know and does not care what Terminal Services is; thus, it is highly probable that the large majority will not deviate from the OS default and disable it. To the rest of us that do care about the possible security vulnerability created by running Terminal Services, and have taken measure to disable the service, it isn’t fair that Norton’s products would re-enable the service (without notification). To people possibly reading this article and don’t know what Terminal Services is here is Microsoft’s description of the service:
“Allows multiple users to be connected interactively to a machine as well as the display of desktops and applications to remote computers. The underpinning of Remote Desktop (including RD for Administrators), Fast User Switching, Remote Assistance, and Terminal Server.”
In laymen’s terms, this means that if this service is running on your computer and is configured correctly a legitimate user (that has the permissions necessary) can connection to your computer and work on it as though they are sitting in front of your computer. It seems an oxymoron, a software package that is suppose to make a computer more secure requires the opening of a possibly security exploit.
For anyone interested I did find a way to keep Terminal Services from starting. All features of NAV 2009 still appear to be working after I applied the workaround mentioned below. In addition, I did this before I performed the installation. After NAV was installed, I had to reboot the computer in order to get NAV to startup. The same procedure below works just fine if you do it after the installation.
Create a user account in computer management.
Disable the account
Go into the services snap-in and double click on Terminal Services.
Click on the ‘Log on’ tab click on the ‘This Account’ radio button and enter the account that you create in the 1st step above. Then enter the password you set for the account above and click apply.
Go back to the ‘General’ tab and choose disable for the startup type.
After changing the Terminal Services startup-type to disabled reboot your computer. After following these steps you will get repeat errors in your system event viewer when you reboot or log into your computer; however, these can simply be ignored. Until I get an appropriate response from Symantec that addresses the following concerns I plan to be an advocate against ALL Symantec products, both professional and personally.
What specific features of Symantec products require Terminal Services to be running, when was it introduced, and why?
Symantec must provide a way programmatically to disable the use of Terminal Services.
Symantec must make it abundantly clear that Terminal Services is required to use the product (by default). This would include putting it in the minimum system requirements and explicit calling its uses out in the ULA.