Epic Battles with McAfee

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What week, I’ve managed about 4 hours of actual development. The problem? McAfee’s on demand scanner.

It all started Monday, whilst I was writing a templated ASP.Net control similar to the inbuilt Logon panel. The difference was that this control respects the privileges of the logged on user, using the Oracle security model that we’re deep into.

Anyway, on using the panel I started getting unrecognised tag errors, and then Devstudio wouldn’t compile the project. At all. So, after a bit of cleaning and the usual go to the dos prompt, i really cleaned the project and tried again. Success.

All the errors went away. Hmm, i thought to myself. must be some cruft from left from the other day when one of the other office staff mistakenly unplugged my PC instead of the electric heater at her feet. Twice.

Any I’d scan-disked the PC and found nothing wrong so off I went merrily coding away. Then odd little errors started creeping in. Tags not recognised, xml schema errors from files I’d not touched for days. It never occurred to me that the On Demand scanner from McAfee could be the culprit. So after blaming myself first for a day, then DevStudio for a day, I started looking at all the other corporate software that was running on the PC. Keep in mind that it takes a day for this because these aren’t the worlds fastest PC’s (the fast ones are on order 🙂 ).

So finally I examine the McAfee On Demand logs. Holy smoke. over 4000 blocked actions in the last hour. Yes I work fast. Either that or there’s a lot of files making up our project 😉

Not only that, but the file it seemed to be scanning was the .ASPX file i just so happened to be working on. I’ll take that as the smoking gun.

So I think I’ve found the culprit, but trying to sort out what to do about it is a whole different story!

Remember that we’re dealing with a corporate IT department. Can I get rid of McAfee? No. I tried that already. Not enough rights. So I ring the IT department. Waivers for developers? modifications to the policies, different virus killer? No, No and NO. So, I’m kind of stuck here. It’s out of my hands now, but given that I’m on a daily rate, this could be getting expensive, and its only when the costs start mounting up that people notice. Nothing I try seems to stop the interference with VS2008, and meanwhile the project is kind of stood still. I haven’t been idle (of course!) I’ve installed a full automated build system whilst I’m waiting for this to get solved, but that’s in a VM where I can guarantee that its running exactly what I want, not what someone else thinks I need 😉

I’ll keep y’all posted.

In the mean time, might I suggest :

1) Don’t use on demand scanners with development environments. Its not worth the hassle. This is the second time McAfee’s bitten me.

2) if you have to use on demand scanners, don’t use McAfee!.

If only real life development was that simple.