November 2008 — News
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Mastering Anti-Virus in Pasco County
If your district is still having its client computers downloading anti-virus updates from a vendor site, machine by machine, Kevin Stiles, network specialist for the Pasco School District in Washington, has some feedback: You're working too hard; you're wasting bandwidth; and that approach really isn't scalable.
Six or seven years ago, however, that's exactly what Stiles' district was doing. The thousand or so computers in use at that time were running McAfee anti-virus software. "It was becoming unmanageable to keep them running," he said. "Too many things were slipping through, including very old viruses." The IT team couldn't control when--or whether--the deployments of updates were happening. Visibility across the enterprise was nil.
Several IT staffers were running a free version of AVG on their home networks, and based on that, they made a recommendation to have the district move to the enterprise version of the software, AVG Anti-virus Network Edition. A major selling point was cost. "We were given the option of spending $6,000 for two years [for AVG's software] or spending $30,000 a year [for an alternate solution]. We didn't have money to burn."
Suddenly, the anti-virus free-for-all became an organized, methodical routine controlled by the IT department. "It made a big difference in our workload and also in our state of mind," said Stiles.
How AVG Works at the District
Currently, district servers pull the updates for the software multiple times during the day. Every four hours, client computers inside the firewall check in with those servers to see if there's a new update to install.
According to Stiles, the draw on bandwidth for all that network communication is minimal. "It's basically, do you have anything? And then it's quiet," he said. "Network traffic is low, and its impact on the [client] machine's operation is low." The virus scan itself typically runs in the afternoon.
The district has about 3,000 workstations deployed across 15 schools and administrative offices. Two virtual servers running on VMware Server from VMware inside the firewall handle updates for machines in all the school sites except one, pulling data from an internal DNS server. The two servers also act as failover backups for each other. A Kemp Technologies load balancer manages traffic between the two servers.
Client machines that aren't on the internal network, such as notebook computers taken home for the weekend or during breaks, connect to a virtual server located outside the district's firewall, getting its information from an external DNS server. That ensures, said Stiles, "We can still regulate what updates they get and track which updates they've received."
