23 January 2007, 12:41

McAfee scanner makes Lotus Notes inoperable

Users of IBM Lotus Notes 6 or 7 and MacAfee's VirusScan Enterprise should hold off updating to version 8.5i of the virus scanner. In certain circumstances the upgrade results in a loss of access to e-mails, with users seeing the error message "You are not authorized to perform that operation." It is then no longer possible to perform further actions in Lotus Notes.

VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i was released back at the end of November, but, according to US media reports, the problem still appears to be acute, as McAfee have not yet fixed the problem. As a workaround, McAfee, in an error report, recommends simply closing and restarting Lotus Notes. It is then possible to continue working with the application for a few hours, before the problem then reoccurs. According to reports from a California company, this does not really fix the problem, rather a complete reinstall of Lotus Notes is required. They have therefore rolled back the update to version 8.0i.

IBM recommends uninstalling McAfee VirusScan 8.5i or deactivating Scan all server databases and Scan server mailboxes.

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