Remotely Uninstall Symantec Antivirus

I’m not going into the reasons here, but I recently needed to uninstall Symantec Antivirus from all client computers on our network (~25 computers) in order to install a new antivirus client. Since it was so few computers, I really could have just sat down at each one and uninstalled the program through Control Panel.  But what fun is that when you can do it remotely?

After reading an article on the subject, I did some more investigating and this is the process I came up with:

1. Download PSTools and unzip into C:\Windows\System32
2. Get the Symantec Antivirus uninstall registry ID from regedit by way of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Uninstall.  Go through the subkeys and search for the one that has Symantec in the Value Name.  For example, I had Symantec Corporate Antivirus v10.x and the ID was {78D891EF-9E2D-4FC8-A71F-E6F897BA1B21}
3. Remotely connect to Symantec System Center server using domain administrator account
4. (Optional: if you require a password to uninstall) Using regedit, remotely connect to each computer to edit registry.  What we’re looking for is under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ INTEL \ LANDesk \ VirusProtect6 \ CurrentVersion \ AdministratorOnly \ Security. Make sure the two values, “LockUnloadServices” and “UseVPUninstallPassword,” are zero.
5. Logged in as a domain admininistrator, using PsExec, run MsiExec to uninstall.  Example,
   C:\>psexec \\COMPUTER_NAME MsiExec.exe /norestart /q /x {78D891EF-9E2D-4FC8-A71F-E6F897BA1B21} REMOVE=ALL

Assuming all went well, you should get an error code of zero, which means everything went successfully.  Should you get any other error code, look it up.

Manually Configure Time Machine’s Backup Interval

Time Machine has always annoyed me with how frequent it wants to backup.  It takes no consideration what you are currently doing and if you have Time Capsule, your workflow grinds to a complete halt while Time Machine and Time Capsule get buddy-buddy over your network.

My issue is not with Time Machine itself.  It’s a great idea and great program!  I just wish there was a better control panel for it.  Oh well, time to get down and dirty.

From this hint I was able to set the Time Machine backup schedule from one hour to six hours.

Basically, in Terminal, you:

cd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
sudo vi com.apple.backupd-auto.plist


Note: I’m using the vi editor to do this hack. You can choose any editor you wish, just make sure you have proper permissions.

Once open, you change the property:

<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>


Where 3600 is the number of seconds you want Time Machine to run. I changed mine to 21600 and voila!

Now maybe I can play a DVD without Time Machine interupting my full screen.

Radiohead pen new Palahniuk score

Radiohead pen new Palahniuk score
from BBC World News
Radiohead write the score for the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s latest book, Choke, the author tells BBC 6 Music.

This is amazing and exciting! As said in the article, Palahniuk listened to Radiohead’s Pablo Honey consistently while writing Choke.

No Twitter for Hitler

“Like the other night I was out partying with some friends and tried to text message a tweet about how wonderful life is…”

I feel very conflicted by actually agreeing with Hitler on this one topic. I’m a bad person.

How the British View Americans

Olympic opening draws 5m viewers
from BBC World News
The spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics is watched live by five million people in the UK, but a delayed broadcast angers US viewers.

Read: The spectacular opening ceremoney of the Beijing Olympics is watched live by five million people in the UK, but Americans are silly people who are upset that they are not always the center of attention.