Vaccinate Your NT File Services With Antivirus Server Software By Jay Milne   Lke the insurance industry, the market for antivirus software is driven primarily by fear, uncertainty and doubt. You may never need an antivirus program, but when you do, you're glad it's there. Although there are no known viruses that will attack and corrupt a Microsoft Windows NT server, NT is a medium to store viruses that can later attack client workstations. An antivirus product that scans incoming and outgoing files limits the spread of virus-infected files on your network. To view the Report card. With our corporate lab partner in the San Francisco Bay A rea, we tested six products--Cheyenne InocuLAN 4 for Windows NT; Dr Solomon's Software Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows NT; Intel Corp.'s LANDesk Virus Protect 1.7; McAfee's NetShield for NT 2.53; Symantec Corp.'s Norton AntiVirus 2.0 for Windows NT; and Trend Micro's ServerProtect for NT--to determine how well they prevent the spread of viruses. All of these products caught the majority of our sample test viruses, and each provides an adequate level of protection. In addition, each is certified by the National Computer Security Association (NCSA), ensuring a basic level of virus detection. If you're concerned about file server overhead, we found that none of these products increased transfer times by more than 4 percent. The similarities end there, however; these products show clear differences in terms of management, alert functions and follow-through. Cheyenne InocuLAN 4 for Windows NT Of the products we tested, Cheyenne's InocuLAN 4 for Windows NT provides the most robust management, offering features such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), pag ing and support for Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange. In addition, InocuLAN is the only one to provide cross-platform (NT and Novell NetWare) management from a single console. InocuLAN also is the only product to support the Intel platform as well as Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC, enabling it to be deployed on any NT server. We found InocuLAN easy to use, and we thought the remote server installation feature, which lets a network administrator install InocuLAN on any server once the proper NT security has been granted, was very useful. Two of InocuLAN's strongest attributes are its management features and its support of virus signatures. In fact, this software offers the best multiple-server management of the products we tested. Like Trend Micro's ServerProtect and McAfee's NetShield, InocuLAN offers remote management. And also like Serve rProtect, InocuLAN lets you create logical groups of servers for easier organization of resources and better multiserver management. The InocuLAN console can manage and distribute signature files with InocuLAN for NetWare servers--a welcome feature for multi-NOS environments. To assist with the management of virus signature files, InocuLAN includes a AutoDownload Manager, which connects to Cheyenne's FTP or bulletin-board system (BBS) server on a scheduled basis. Unfortunately, the service does not support proxy gateways. This limitation can be circumvented by configuring the proxy server to "see" the Cheyenne Web site as a trusted host. The management screen displays a wealth of information and does a good job of visually indicating that the InocuLAN service is running. It also automatically detects domains and servers (a task ServerProtect and NetShield cannot perform). To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the Antivirus Software for NT Server Features chart, click here.

Scale Ahead of Net Traffic With ATM Edge Switches by Joel Conover Updated March 25, 1997