[stillwaters]

Hi!

N00b Alert (I recently graduated with an associate degree in IT and several certs, including A+, MCTS in Windows 7 and Server 2008 Active Directory, and CCNA, but I have very little real world experience.) I send my son to a small private school, and they've been asking me for IT help in exchange for tuition reductions. They have two buildings with one Windows Server 2008 Server in each building, and around 25 workstations including lab computers, faculty, and administrative. They desperately need an antivirus solution, right now they are using free antiviruses on the workstations, and they won't update without an administrative login. If anyone has any advice for me I'd appreciate it very much. Also, they are on a very limited budget so they can't spend more than a couple hundred dollars.

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Hi Stillwaters.

What free antivirus solution are they running? If it wont update without an administrator being logged in that's a real problem.

I've worked with quite a few enterprise antivirus solutions and I would recommend GFI's Vipre (Previously Sunbelt) for that. They have pricing for very small setups and it's the type of solution that you set up once and forget about (which I image lines up with what you were looking for).

[NeonFx]

Hi Stillwaters.

What free antivirus solution are they running? If it wont update without an administrator being logged in that's a real problem.

I've worked with quite a few enterprise antivirus solutions and I would recommend GFI's Vipre (Previously Sunbelt) for that. They have pricing for very small setups and it's the type of solution that you set up once and forget about (which I image lines up with what you were looking for).

[mbond65]

Hello ,

Personally I would recommend SEP (Symantec endpoint protection). In terms of administrative prompt for an update, maybe you could look at solving this problem if the current setup works?

Are the users allowed local admin rights? If so, create a GPO on the DC that will implement local admin rights to all users. You can do this via (restricted groups) - Google it

Kind Regards
Michael

[stillwaters]

I actually got a suggestion somewhere else to try techsoup, and I found Symantec Endpoint Protection for Small Business available for $4. I think we qualify as a nonprofit school. I'm going to test it on a couple of machines to make sure the hardware can run it (some computers only have 512 MBs RAM.) I'll keep you posted.

[Troy]

Why would you want all users to have local admin rights?

I have clients who run Trend Micro WFBS on their small business networks. The updates automatically happen in the background and the users are none the wiser (even non-admins). And if it is a company laptop and they are away from the office, I can configure it to automatically update directly from Trend Micro servers instead, again no admin rights necessary.

[stillwaters]

Avira free needs local admin rights to update. (maybe it's meant to discourage people from using it -illegally- in a domain.)

[mbond65]

You would be surprised at the amount of worldwide organisations I've worked for where all users are given local admin rights. Im not saying that that means its justified but sometimes, its the best policy

[techiDooDah]

ESET NOD32 is an enterprise grade anti-virus solution which is also very cheap compared to a lot of competitors, and I think they do special rates for the education sector.

Here's a link - http://www.eset.co.u...oint-Protection

It's got a console for central administration allowing all of the usual - agent push-out/removal/full scan/virus update, etc.

Hope that helps

Ed

Fancy some IT babble?

[ShoppingMonk]

Eset is the best anti-virus software for the small portions of systems