With the recent release of OS X Mavericks we have a whole new array of fun issues to take care of. Although we don’t support Mavericks yet, we have been working to better understand it in relation with our network compliance policies. The main issue so far has been that many anti-virus suites still don’t support Mavericks at this point (or at best they’re in beta and still buggy).

Symantec is currently working on getting something together to support Mavericks, but probably wont be ready until mid to late November. Sophos is also working on getting something together here in the next few weeks. At the moment, Avast! is the only anti-virus provider who claims to support Mavericks.

The Avast! version that is rumored to work best (note: some bugs still being reported) is the beta2 version, which can only be found on the Avast! forums. Download at:

http://files.avast.com/files/beta/avast_free_antivirus_mac_setup-beta2.dmg

Rather than waiting for all of these companies to come out with support for Mavericks we’ve found that with the new OS there is a work-around to keep Symantec. If a mac with a working and up to date Symantec suite is upgraded to OS X Mavericks then Symantec should continue to work fine, at least with what we’ve seen so far.

This is a screen shot of what a compliant mac running OS X Mavericks and Symantec will look like on our network.

This Symantec work-around only seems to work if the Mac in question already had Symantec installed, running, and up-to-date prior to upgrading to Mavericks. If someone does want to upgrade, try and advise them to at least use time machine before so that in the case of falling out of compliance with out network they can roll back to a working system.