McAfee virusscan

[Chris Yuzik]

OMG! I'm ready to pull what's left of my hair out.

NAI and McAfee are virtually impossible to deal with. I have wasted no
less than 3 hours on the phone over the past couple of days trying to
get pricing for McAfee Virusscan commandline for Unix (or Linux). I
managed to download an evaluation version and it seems fine. I have
talked with 3 resellers that are all "not familiar with that product"
and all promise to get back to me after talking to McAfee...and, of
course, they never do.

I've called McAfee and talked with almost a dozen people. I finally
talked to one person who told me that the commandline version of
Virusscan is no longer sold on its own and is only available as part of
the Virusscan Suite for the Desktop 5-user version. Cost on that is
apparently US$200 for the first year, then $82 per year thereafter.
According to the MailScanner FAQ, it should be more like $12 for a
perpetual license.

One person I talked with suggested that the Command Line version MIGHT
be included in the boxed retail package of McAfee Virusscan
Professional, but all the literature just says Windows. According to
someone at NAI, it's only the Windows version.

It looks like there is something called the "McAfee Active VirusScan
Suite Small Business Edition" that allegedly includes the command line
scanner for unix/linux. Minimum purchase is 2 nodes, so cost is about
US$80...but I cannot purchase this product because I am in Canada...and
apparently, it's not available in Canada unless I purchase 11 nodes. Did
I mention I only have 1 machine? Argh!

Am I missing something here? Is purchasing software supposed to be this
difficult?

Perhaps I'm used to the way good shareware works...I download it,
install it, and if I like it, pay for it. Then, they send me some sort
of key file that I put on the machine and it keeps working.

Can anyone shed any light here? Any McAfee users out there know the secret?

Cheers,
Chris