Martin E's community posts


On 1/18 at least half of my hosts were quarantined as a hack tool

Well, I just lost access to hosts that I reinstalled from the AV incident in January.  I had even created exclusions on these systems for the folder and processes.  AV now flagged rfusclient.exe as malicious and removed it.

Sorry, but I'm done.  In less than 6 months I've lost access to hundreds of systems, twice.  This disruption to my business just can't happen.  I have used, and my clients' currently use, various other remote access programs and have not experienced this disruption.

You can throw your arms in the air and blame the AV vendors, but I can name at least 4 other remote access/mgmt products that have not had this issue.  I've stuck it out because I really liked the isolation/security of Remote Utilities, but it has become a liability to my business.  Once again I cannot support my clients via remote access.

Outage

Douglas,

Check if RU has been flagged by AV.  I've seen another wave of older RU hosts being removed.  Just received a message today from a client of mine that their systems are showing an error about "cannot find rfusclient.exe" on startup.

On 1/18 at least half of my hosts were quarantined as a hack tool

While you are correct, I used other well-known remote access tools for years before switching over to Remote Utilities without a single incident of AV conflict.  Unfortunately, I'm now at a point that RU will cost me real money to travel to remote sites that have 100% offline hosts to re-establish connectivity.

As it stands this morning, I've lost over a third of my 800+ hosts.  If I have to go through the effort to fix this, I'm also going through the effort to try to prevent this in the future.

On 1/18 at least half of my hosts were quarantined as a hack tool

I have now lost access to 100+ hosts as Remote Utilities was identified as a hack tool and quarantined.  I've been trying to figure out why my hosts were offline.  I've been able to get in via a few remaining hosts and used a vnc tool to access the systems that I know to be online.  Nothing remains of Remote Utilities but a few log files.  Windows Defender, etc. have decided RU is a hack tool and removed it entirely.

Different host versions going back to 6.8.0.1 to the lastest.  Different operating systems, in different locations, using different ISPs.

Yes, I could have excluded RU from any AV access, but I naively assumed RU had been around long enough to not have this happen.  Apparently, I'm wrong.

FYI, if you have hosts you know to be online but show offline, you may need to find another way in.

Remote Utilities showing my hosts offline

Same in San Diego.  Would be nice if there were some sort of notice/status.

All 6.3.0.2 hosts show offline, unable to connect

FYI, I know it's not a 9 digit vs 12 digit issue.  I have hosts that were updated to 6.10.10.0 that still use the old 9 digit ID, and they're online and can be accessed.  But since you brought it up, are you saying 9 digit IDs are going to stop working as well?  How would I possibly get a new ID remotely without a physical presence to each system?

All 6.3.0.2 hosts show offline, unable to connect

That's a nice workaround, but not exactly feasible.  The hosts are spread out over a large geophraphic area, so it would take quite a while to visit every site.  Since they're offline, I can't get to them to update remotely.  And even if I could, I've found the remote updates have failed, requiring a complete reinstall, about a third of the time.  Again, requiring onsite access to the systems.

I cannot update to version 7 yet, because of the incompatibilities between viewer and host with older versions.

All 6.3.0.2 hosts show offline, unable to connect

As the title says, all of my hosts that still use 6.3.0.2 with the old 9 digit key show offline and I'm unable to connect.  Using 6.10.10.0 viewer.

Remote Utilities showing not online

Can you please get this under control.  I'm trying to work through a remote support emergency, and my access keeps going up and down.

Down entirely now.  No access to any systems.
Edited:Martin Eichelman - Jan 21, 2021 1:10:20 pm EST

Remote Utilities showing not online

Just an FYI that this is happening again.  All hosts show as offline, but I can still connect if I try.  I'm in southern CA if it makes a difference.