I need to manage McAfee antivirus updates on the IT.NET workstations. Naturally I don't want over 80 boxes all individually pulling down virus updates, so I've been developed a centralised Virus Update Server.
The idea is that I coax one of my trusty Unix boxes into regularly pulling down the McAfee DAT updates, after which they are posted on a samba share ready for the workstations to run. This project will feature a number of other tricks I have written about already, including the use of wget for downloading the files and cron for scheduling these downloads. So I won't labour too much on these utilities as they are already documented in some detail.
First step was to find just where McAfee publishes its antivirus updates. Many talk about it, but few reveal its true location. After eventually sussing the FTP address and path, I wrote a little script..
#!/bin/sh
# Virus Update Server - McAfee Antivirus
cd /shares/vupdate
rm *.exe
wget -r -nc --no-directories \
ftp://ftp.nai.com/pub/antivirus/superdat/intel/
Those last two lines can both go on a single line - I just didn't have enough pagewidth to do it. The
rm line blows away any previous update files and
wget grabs the contents of the /intel directory for the new ones. I've only got Windows boxes on the network, so I can ignore all the other types of update file on the Network Associates server. The fresh files are then sitting in the
samba directory share, ready for use.
Crontab takes care of the timing, performing the download at 0200 in the morning when everybody's asleep..
crontab
00 02 * * * vupdate.sh
After that it's just a matter of getting the workstations to update themselves from the Update Server on a regular basis. See
Virus Update Server for the second part of this cutting edge adventure.
- A.
