After upgrading a Sophos Antivirus solution there was an issue where you could not install the new Sophos Console 4 on a Windows 7 machine. This was a bit of a pain in the butt as the user needed to either have access to another XP/Vista machine to install a remote console or to log into the server and run the console from there. I personally wasn’t a big fan of either.

After looking up another issue on the Sophos knowledgebase I noticed a new link that happened to go off to Sophos’ brand new shiny forums. As with most forums I often feel a little let down and underwhelmed at the amout and quality of responses. As I looked through the posts (there weren’t too many as the forums had only been officialy open for a week or so) I noticed someone posting about installing the console on Windows 7. Can you imagine how happy I was to not only see a response .. but a resonse that was a working solution!

Here my friends, is how to install Console 4 on Windows 7 (if you need to know)

The more supported way:

Install Windows XP Mode if your Windows 7 licence permits. It is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

You can then install the Enterprise Console role only on the virtual XP machine.

On the Windows 7 machine, you can then launch Enterprise Console from Start – All Programs – Windows Virtual PC – Windows XP Mode Applications – Sophos – Enterprise Console (XP Mode).

For information, the shortcut to the application becomes something like:

%SystemRoot%\system32\rundll32.exe %SystemRoot%\system32\VMCPropertyHandler.dll,LaunchVMSal "Windows XP Mode" "||325d262f" "Enterprise Console "

The unsupported way

Please note, this is performed at your own risk as it is currently untested to run this version of the console on Windows 7. Please take any necessary system backups/restore points prior to continuing. Upgrading to a future version may also not work when employing this method.

1. Copy the unpacked “sec_40” directory (as generated by the SFX download) to the Windows 7 machine. E.g. "C:\sec_40".

2. Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) running as Administrator (This is important otherwise the installation will fail). To do so, search for cmd.exe in the “Search programs and files” search field in the Start menu. When it appears above, you can right click and choose “Run as administrator”.

3. In the command prompt, change directory to C:\sec_40\ServerInstaller\.

CD C:\sec_40\ServerInstaller\

4. Run: "Sophos Enterprise Console.msi" OVERRIDECHECKS=TRUE

5. At the “Setup Type” page, choose “Custom” and then ensure just the “Management console” feature is selected. Do not choose a “Complete” installation or choose to install any other components.

6. On the “Management Server” page choose the IP, or hostname of the machine where the Sophos Management Service is installed and then continue with the install.

7. Before launching Enterprise Console, ensure that your account is a member of the necessary groups, namely “Sophos Console Administrators” and if the user hasn’t be granted specific access through RBA then also “Sophos Full Administrators".

8. From the Start menu you should be able to launch "Enterprise Console".