McAfee and virus dif updates

External Since: Feb 04, 2004 Posts: 13

A friend works for a medium size company with 200~300 PCs scattered around
the county (U.S.). They are networked and connected to the home office via
the Internet.

She noticed that the new PCs she received were not automatically updating
McAfee VirusScan ver 7.1 every week as the schedule setup indicated it
should. A manual update was successful.

She contacted her IT department at a remote location to notify them of the
failure to automatically update. She also asked if it wasn't a good idea to
schedule an update at least daily.

The response was that McAfee only issues updates on Fridays. That's the day
setup, although it wasn't working. And if the update didn't go off as
scheduled this Friday they would send her new software. Boy, what an
answer.

Am I wrong or doesn't McAfee issue special updates as required?

I know for a fact that Symantec issues special updates as required. My
Norton A/V checks every 4 hours.

Thanks for any input.....

External Since: Jul 04, 2003 Posts: 17

"Bishoop" <none DeleteThis @none.net> wrote in
news:DvmdnUM5OKUA17zd4p2dnA@giganews.com:

> A friend works for a medium size company with 200~300 PCs scattered
> around the county (U.S.). They are networked and connected to the home
> office via the Internet.
>
> She noticed that the new PCs she received were not automatically
> updating McAfee VirusScan ver 7.1 every week as the schedule setup
> indicated it should. A manual update was successful.
>
> She contacted her IT department at a remote location to notify them of
> the failure to automatically update. She also asked if it wasn't a good
> idea to schedule an update at least daily.
>
> The response was that McAfee only issues updates on Fridays. That's the
> day setup, although it wasn't working. And if the update didn't go off
> as scheduled this Friday they would send her new software. Boy, what an
> answer.
>
> Am I wrong or doesn't McAfee issue special updates as required?
>
> I know for a fact that Symantec issues special updates as required. My
> Norton A/V checks every 4 hours.
>
> Thanks for any input.....

I manage McAfee for our company (~600PC's) and this is what I know.

Normal updates are released on Wednesdays (I just downloaded the latest
about 5 minutes ago). Emergency updates are occasionally released. There
have been about 3 in the last week due to Mydoom and variants. We have
McAfee Enterprise and the default config we use is to check for updates
daily (3PM +/- 1 hour random). We also do updates as part of our login
script. Finally you can get the updates via their FTP site:

ftp://ftp.nai.com/pub/antivirus/superdat/intel/