Labs

AntiVir may not be well known in the UK, but on the surface it offers an impressive selection of anti-virus tools for a wide range of platforms, including options for NetWare and Exchange. However, dive beneath and you'll find a disparate collection of utilities with minimal management features and little or no integration between components.

AntiVir for Servers looks after Windows NT and 2000 Server platforms and installs a real- time scanner as a service, which is completely transparent. To access its settings, you load the AntiVir remote-control console. This offers a basic interface revealing configuration settings along with real-time and on-demand scan status. A scheduler allows automated scans to be run at regular intervals on selected drives or directories. However, notification and alerting options are poor, as these are limited to a network

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broadcast to specific systems, an entry in the NT event log and a locally held report file. Automating virus definition updates proved to be a mystery too. We could find no tools for this, the documentation was devoid of instructions and our calls for help went unanswered by the AntiVir support staff.

Remote management of other servers is also a possibility - you select a system from the remote console, although this doesn't differentiate between servers and workstations and will fail if the target is already running the console locally. You get the same interface, except that all scanning and scheduling commands are being sent to the remote system and you can remotely monitor their progress.

AntiVir for Workstations comes in two varieties, with one for Windows NT, 2000 and XP and another supporting Windows 95, 98 and ME. Note that there are no central deployment and management facilities and no integration with the server remote console, so users are largely responsible for their own local protection. The interface is easy enough to use and offers plenty of scanning tools, although calling the main file scanner utility 'Luke Filewalker' is rather juvenile.

Definition update options are more sophisticated than those in the server version, as one workstation can download them from the AntiVir website and place them in a shared directory where other systems are able to pull the updates over the network at regular intervals.