CyberSoft News For June 2002
Product Obsoleteness Notice
Product Obsoleteness Notice
From the President
As many of you know, CyberSoft has been hard at work making many improvements to our VFind family of tool kits. Some of these enhancements have been substantial increases in speed, substantial decreases in memory requirements, improvements in our polymorphic detection engine and many new features. We have also added many new functions for our customers who are using VFind and UAD as part of their email scanning systems; the latest being features to unbuffer piping for use in Unix deamond processes. In addition to all of our activity, there are now even more manufacturers who have chosen to license our technology for use in their products. This increases the number of available products using VFind for our customers.
This summer we expect to produce even more exciting enhancements to VFind in addition to releasing our new Wave Antivirus for Windows. The only problem we have is that many of our customers never upgrade. This is a serious problem that affects their ability to protect themselves. In addition, we have customers who because of the extremely large number of systems that need to be upgraded require about a year to do so. In one case, we found a customer running a product that was 4 years old. Without any updates or even virus definition updates, their ability to protect themselves against viruses that are newer than their database is limited. We have done our best to help customers who have long upgrade cycles by maintaining backward compatibility with our VDLs and programs but our ability to do so is finite. We are currently supporting 7 different versions of the VFind tool kits and 4 different versions of the VDL files. All of this extra support takes away from development. I remind customers that upgrades are included with maintenance support so there are no additional product costs to upgrade for customers who have purchased maintenance or who are still in their first year free maintenance period.
There are four things we can do to solve these problems. The first is to release an automated update and upgrade tool. CyberSoft has been working on such a tool for over 2 years. It is called VUpdate. It should be released by year end. The second thing we can do is to make transition and support plans for specific customers who need longer lead times than normal. The third thing we can do is to stop supporting older versions of the product that customers should no longer run. Unsupported products will continue to run and new VDL files may continue to work with them but we will not guarantee that they will. The fourth thing we can do is to announce a MANDATORY UPGRADE. This is your formal notice that there will be a mandatory upgrade before the end of year 2002. All versions of the products older than the mandatory upgrade will be automatically unsupported when the mandatory upgrade product is released. We do not have an exact date for the mandatory upgrade yet because we are attempting to include as many new features as possible to insure as long a product life as possible. To get an idea of how old the package version of the VFind Security Tool Kit you are running is, look at this chart.
Please note that the Release Date is estimated. Formal records of release dates were destroyed.
VFind Security Tool Kit and Professional Release Date by Package Version Number
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* 163 will be released within a couple of weeks of this publication date and was included here for completeness and customer planning.
VSTK/P 159 and 160 will be unsupported on October 31, 2002 or on the mandatory upgrade date, whichever is first. VSTK/P 160R2 will be unsupported on November 27, 2002 or on the mandatory upgrade date, whichever is first. VSTK/P 161, 161R2 and 161R3 will be unsupported on December 22, 2002 or on the mandatory upgrade date, whichever is first. Special arrangements for support of these products can be made beyond these dates on a case by case basis, including support beyond the mandatory upgrade date.
Peter V. Radatti
President
Frequency Asked Questions
The answer to many technical support questions can be found on our web site in the Frequently Asked Questions section located at www.cybersoft.com/support/faq.shtml
There are also many code fragments for use in programming, full documentation and other useful items in the support section of the site.
New technical white papers are always being added to the site at www.cybersoft.com/whitepapers/index.shtml The white papers are divided into six categories; white papers, articles, featured guests, presentations and patents & trademarks. You can reach each of these sections from the links near the top of the index page.
CYBER.COM is CYBERSOFT.COM
Many of you may have noticed that the www.cyber.com web site address is also the www.cybersoft.com web site. We purchased the cybersoft.com domain from its prior holder and pointed it to the same address. This should help customers who typed in our company name as a domain and did not get us.
You should have also noticed that the web site is constantly being updated. We have a new full time Webmaster who is constantly working at improving the site. If you have any suggestions, feel free to contact him by phone or webmaster@cyber.com
“My License Key Does Not Work”
FAQ questions 20 and 30 point to some solutions to this problem. The most common problem are requests for Domain Names instead of Hostnames. They are not the same. A hostname is typically a single short name for a system. An example of which is “server47”. That server may or may not have one or more domain names associated with it, like www.cybersoft.com.
A new tool has been delivered in the last couple of releases of the VFind Security Tool Kits called VTest. It is designed to help users request the correct hostname for their systems in addition to debugging problems with bad license keys. Take a look at the FAQ and the VTest documentation for more information.
waVe Antivirus for Windows
Wave Antivirus for Windows (95, 98, NT, Me, 2000 and XP) should be released this month. If you would like a competitive bid on your Windows antivirus solutions, please call Shawn ( +1 610-825-4748 or shawn@cyber.com ) and ask for pricing.
You can also visit the waVe Antivirus web site at www.waveantivirus.com Be sure to look at the vintage beach scenes some, of which go back to the 1920’s.
FreeBSD Now Supported
In addition to BSDi, CyberSoft now supports the FreeBSD Version 4.2 Stable. This is in addition to all of the other Unix platforms we support such as Solaris, AIX, HPUX, IRIX, Linux, SCO, DGUX, Siemens and many others. Remember, CyberSoft will always support new Unix platforms for the cost of the system.
Public Service Web Site
CyberSoft has a public service web site about the United States flag which you can visit at www.highflyingflag.com Some of the off site links are slightly political but they have all been selected for historical value. The primary focus of the site is historical and is intended for students and others interested in the US flag.
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