Norton AntiVirus CE and SBS 4.5
Brian Jesteadt
Antivirus, but instead was handed the software and was told to make it work.
I personally have nothing against Symantec, except Norton AntiVirus version
5.0, because it just plain sucks donkeys.
My question is regarding Norton Antivirus Corporate edition (conveniently
named CE by Symantec, as if the abbreviation wasn't used too much already)
and my SBS 4.5 server. The corporate edition allows administrators to
manage the client's antivirus software centrally, usually from a server.
They recommend installing it on the server, but not without testing it on a
non-production machine first. Weeelll... I only have 1 server, so I'm
supposed to just dump it in there and hope it works? Forgive me if I'm
reluctant. I'm hoping someone has used the product or knows someone who
has, and maybe some things to watch out for. Should I just forget about
managing clients remotely and do it manually (similar to the regular old
client product)? It sounds nice to manage clients from a central server,
but not if it's going to shoot my processor utilization through the roof.
Any suggestions would be greatly welcomed.
Thanks,
Brian
Jeff Middleton [SBS-MVP]
I had issues with the installation of Solution Suite on the server, and
found the fact that they totally reworked Solution Suite from version 3.0 to
4.0 a mixed blessing.
I had client installation problems only in the operation of the NAV, not in
the deployment...with the exception that their method for sending updates to
the client stations on Win9x was only at logon, so if a user never logs off,
they don't get updated. (this may have changed)
I've found the extraneous DOS level revisions of the Autoexec.bat and
Config.sys command to be an irritation because of the logon script delays
that they can cause, and there were some printer corruptions that I saw in
one site related to a DOS Accounting application running in a Win32 window
that was totally bizarre.
I'd like to tell you that you that you will have no trouble with your
server, but that isn't my experience. All I can tell you is that uninstall
and repeat fixed the problems for no reason I can offer, and it didn't hose
the server, just brought it to it's knees.
"Brian Jesteadt" <brian_jesteadt@(no spam)mhfls.com> wrote in message
news:uOvz9DpaAHA.1808@tkmsftngp03...
Brian Jesteadt
engine is up to 4.1.0.6, I don't know how far that is from the other Norton
products, but any change would be a welcome one. They now let you
distribute antivirus updates in realtime, but only through the server
install (cringe). At least I can feel fairly confident that the server
install shouldn't kill the server, just bog it down. Any idea how much load
I should be tolerating? No more than 10-15% load, less, more? I'm still
kinda new to this. Thanks for the help.
Brian
"Jeff Middleton [SBS-MVP]" <je...@cfisolutions.com> wrote in message
news:OBcIg4raAHA.2020@tkmsftngp04...
Jeff Middleton [SBS-MVP]
different terms, though.
I found that if I added another stick of 128Mb DIMM to the system (vs. no AV
on the server at all, including nothing looking at Exchange, even with no
major activity), if I wanted the machine to seem like it did before, the AV
would claim about 35Mb of RAM, and an increase of about 100Mhz in processor
was in order (i.e. a 550Mhz looked like a 450Mhz). Stating it differently,
I think that if you have no SQL going on and you have a PIII 550 or above
with 256Mb of RAM, you won't really see a drop in performance that you care
about, from my perspective. Most of my servers were PII300 to PIII450 with
128Mb when I started deploying AV from the server and I generally bumped the
RAM and CPU speed by double as part of the same upgrade, and found plenty of
improvement in performance for doing all three, RAM, CPU and AV in the same
visit......this is the positive spin for the customer. "you need a bit more
RAM, and CPU, but if you do all three at once, you still get more out of the
server regardless."
"Brian Jesteadt" <brian_jesteadt@(no spam)mhfls.com> wrote in message
news:#KWXx9raAHA.2100@tkmsftngp05...
Traig Zeigler
clients. It was a complete disaster! Despite following all the product
manual instructions, as well as all the relevant Knowledge Base docs, I
couldn't even get the major components to install without errors. In
addition, the NTREMOTE push feature didn't work correctly, as the client
software would be pushed out to client workstations at login but the NAV
component then would hog 80-95% CPU time and bring the workstation to its
knees!
I eventually had to visit each machine and manually uninstall all remnants
of the NAV CE "virus" to restore the network to normal operation. Even to
this day, despite following all the manual uninstall instructions to the
"T", some of the machines still throw up a Symantec DLL error when certain
apps are executed.
Tech support absolutely sucked and was completely unresponsive to my
requests for assistance. I will never purchase another Symantec product for
any of the networks I design/implement/manage. No way!
Traig Zeigler
MCSE, CCEA
"Brian Jesteadt" <brian_jesteadt@(no spam)mhfls.com> wrote in message
news:uOvz9DpaAHA.1808@tkmsftngp03...
Robin
> My question is regarding Norton Antivirus Corporate edition (conveniently
> named CE by Symantec, as if the abbreviation wasn't used too much already)
> and my SBS 4.5 server.
Same setup here, and it's working. 7.0 was a little flaky, notably
anytime the server had to be rebooted it would crash on the first
reboot, and stay up and running on the second one. Not exactly warm and
fuzzy, but it was predictable. Never crashed "unprovoked" (by
rebooting.) 7.5 seems to be a vast improvement. The upgrade (7.0-7.5)
went *very* smoothly, with no reboots needed for either the clients or
server.
I've been impressed by the remote management, very convinient,
informative, etc.
Let me know if you'd like more information on the two.