Is there anyone else having major issues with CAs ETrust ?

[Luis Toro]

I did a search on "ETrust" in the forum and got several postings where the product is referenced. It leads me to believe that someone, somewhere is having at least some success with this product. We have had so many issues (ie., the daemons/agents taking up too much CPU and memory). After the latest set of patches from CA, we had to kill the daemons; they had accumulated over 200mb of memory in 2 hours, and the usage was still going up. I would have thought that this memory leak problem would be more prevalent. Any input (even CA-bashing) would be useful.

[John Bolene]

We run Etrust (used to be called seos) and hate the product but it is required by management.

It acts differently on different servers. Some use a lot of cpu, some have the memory leak, some take an occasional system hang or crash.

We have ours set to 30 day password expiration and a 6 password history (corporate requirement). What a pain in the rear having to change passwords at less than one month intervals and remembering what the passwords were since you can't reuse the last 6 of them.

I don't know of anything it has prevented except for many extra hours of time to put up with what it requires you to do.

We also have at least 2 DCE servers that it can't be started on because it hangs the server in the initialization routines when the server is rebooted.

[John Payne_2]

We have have had etrust on campus for quite some time now. Our problem is getting it implemented the right way. Once it looks like things are starting to go well, we find another bug or conflict that is a show stopper. Every time that happens, CA says "That is fixed in the next version. We will have a GA date soon."

I could have had the same level of security with HP's tools and opensource and been done in a month (or less). The problem is that we need things to be able to run on all our OS's, and that is why we still struggle to get Etrust product on a single machine...

Hope it helps

John

[Pete Randall]

Luis,

I'm not an ETrust user but was involved in early CA-Unicenter testing. Sounds familiar.

CA loves to acquire disparate products, tie them together with a big, glossy looking bow made from advertising hype, and sell them to management. The only reason we looked at Unicenter was because we were a heavy CA user in the mainframe days and management "suggested" that we needed it. It took months, long painful months of trying to debug a product that was obviously not ready for prime time, but we were finally able to convince management that this was a fruitless pursuit and the project was abandoned.

We have since seen the light and avoid CA software like the plague. If at all possible, I would suggest you do the same.

Best of luck to you,
Pete

[Luis Toro]

Thanks for all your input. Sounds like we're all in the same boat: upper management initiative to do "mainframe-like" security across open systems platforms.

We may be pulling the plug on it, as well.

[Brian M. Fisher]

I have been using eTrust Access Control for almost a year and have seen some of the problems you mentioned. Two items brought the CPU usage down.
1) Use latest patches (These patches are NOT cumulative)
2) Closely monitor your audit log. Measureware can play chaos with Warning & Denied messages

For all the problems I have encountered, I do not know of another software that can do the same job. One the software have been properly installed and tweeked it works GREAT.

BTW, I work for a division of BellSouth where it is mandated to run it on all of my 25 Sun & HP servers.

Brian
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