Saturday, January 16, 2010

Symantec Antivirus Server for Mac OS X

Well, one of the contractual obligations we have here at the hospital is that all desktop systems have antivirus software installed.

That's not such a big deal, after all there are some obvious standalone AV solutions for the Mac, ClamAV, Intego VirusBarrier, Symantec AntiVirus, and others. The catch is, for IT, we want to manage that client. Immediately the list shortens, and when I'm doing mostly stealth support of the (now almost a dozen) Macs here, I look for the no-cost option.

Strangely enough, we have a super-massive enterprise license for SAV 10- including the Mac Client-Server model. So I start petitioning for a Mac server, running 10.5, before they are impossible to get (after all, I started this a couple weeks after the relase of 10.6). I ask and ask, and now it's January and I have no server. So I have to run this on my own. Fortunately I have a copy of 10.5 server that I can install on ... a Mac Mini. Yes, I am one of those. I believe the Mini has great promise in the role Apple recently promoted it to, as a small workgroup server. Since I am setting up a test and pilot only, not deploying a full live environment, I go ahead and get 10.5.8 Server, mySQL and Web Services going. After a couple odd installation mistakes (I should know by now to actually read the installation guide first, rather than dive right in) I got it all together, with my little cluster of machines running a managed SAV solution.

Frankly, I hope when I start testing the Endpoint version (assuming there is one, I haven't looked) it's a bit more robust. Although the default web interface is functional, it's not really user friendly. No easy way to re-push policy, updates, or changes to systems that may have errored out, really simple (not always clear) error reporting, and a bit of a kludgy interface. But, as of today, I've been running a managed AV environment for about a week on 3 systems, successfully with reporting and all...

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