I am looking for an antivirus program (preferably free) to roll out into an Active Directory office environment.
I would like to be able to update and alter settings for this program (on each machine) via Active Directory so as to not give them all internet access (to update the program etc)
If your machines/users are in AD, you can implement AV database updates to client machines that have ClamWin installed. You'd have to manually download the definition files to a shared accessible to clients (netlogon?), and perhaps setup a startup script that copies those files to the clients. Here's the suggestion from the ClamWin website:
You can get the virus definitions without clamwin via http:// http://database.clamav.net/main.cvd http://database.clamav.net/daily.cvd Then copy the downloaded main.cvd and daily.cvd to your database location which is specified in the ClamWin Preferences, File Locations tab. The default database location is: "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users.clamwin\db"
For installing ClamWin, their downloadable install is an .exe binary, but you might want to take a look at deploying this with an MSI through Group Policy.
Unfortunately, ClamWin doesn't include a live-scan feature. I'm not aware of an open-source/Free solution that includes this feature.
It's not free, but AVG 8.5 is pretty cheap and works pretty well. We use it at dozens of sites and have had few problems with it. The only major irritant is that every other month or so it wants a reboot to complete an update, which is annoying when it's on a server. The AVG administrator console is easier to use than the AVG 7.5 console, but still rather unintuitive. It does work though and gives you centralised control.
I've never seen a free AV that matches AVG or any of the lower end commercial AVs.
JR
