Avast Business On-Premise Management Console 6.0 has just been released (10th September 2018). This release delivers a brand new feature, enhancements and bug fixes.
Feature
Remote Deployment is now available! You will now be able to scan your network for devices and remotely deploy Avast Antivirus to them. The following features of Remote Deployment will be available:
Designate a master agent – Select a device in the network to act as the master agent that will push out the Avast Antivirus installer file. This will save internet bandwidth as the devices will receive the installer file from the master agent and not the internet.
Scan your network via Active Directory – You can add in your Domain, Username and Password of your Active Directory that will allow the Avast Business On-Premise Console to scan for devices through Active Directory and provide a list of these devices.[/li]
Hide devices that already have Avast antivirus installed
Hide devices that are unavailable and unable to install to
See your current Active Directory Groups and what devices are assigned to those groups for deployment
See current Status of each device – ready for deployment, unable to install, installed, unavailable and awaiting status
See the device name and IP address
Search for a device
Copy the whole group structure of Active Directory
Select devices for deployment – From the list of devices that have been found, you can select which devices Avast Antivirus will be installed to.
Define your installer settings – Configure settings before you deploy Avast Antivirus to your devices:
See total number of devices that you will deploy to
Select which license you will use for these devices
Select a group that your devices will be associated with after deployment
Uninstall existing (competitive) Antivirus products automatically during the deployment of Avast Antivirus client
Information on device reboots and automatic license activation
Deploy – Start the deployment.
Deployment results - Shows results of the remote deployment to your devices via the Remote Deployment button on the left navigation menu.
Any failed deployments will show and you will have the ability to attempt a re-deployment to those devices
Remotely force a reboot to devices that have successfully installed Avast Antivirus
Discard deployment – if any devices are waiting in queue to deploy Avast Antivirus client, you can cancel/discard the deployment
Enhancements
Added ability to Password Protect the uninstallation of the Avast Antivirus client from devices. The Password protection will be available under Device Settings > Windows Workstation tab > General Settings.
Automatic device activation is now the default behavior when adding devices to the On-Premise Management Console. Devices are activated automatically now without having to select devices manually to be activated.
You can now Share a download link by email to your users. You can copy the download link and send to your users instead of using the Send download via email options.
Updated the Send download via email page content.
When using any of the Avast Antivirus deployment options (Download the installer, Send download via email and Deploy installers remotely), you will be able to select which group and settings the device that receives the installer will apply to.
Proxy settings page is now available during the installation of the On-Premise Console and Console settings:
o Upon installing the On-Premise Console, one additional step has been added which will allow you to setup your proxy settings for the console.
o This also allows the activation of the console license number through your proxy.
o Allows the user to configure the proxy settings for the console under the General Settings area.
Remove competitive antivirus products option is available for Download the installer, Send Download via email and Remote deployment as an advanced setting.
Removed HTTP Ports and Ignored addresses from the Troubleshooting > Web section as these options are no longer available in the latest client.
Added ability to change the Date Format in the console.
Added ability to insert a wide Port Range (i.e. 50000-65000) into the Firewall – Pack Rules.
Device name will now be clickable within the Task Iteration section of a device.
Bug Fixes
Fixed: Text incorrect issue under the Transfer from other console tab under General Settings for Norman Endpoint Manager.
Fixed: Error page that displayed instead of API code text.
Fixed: Error message text for Server Error, User system, Billing details and many more.
Fixed: Boot-time scan task. Boot-time scan will be created and send to the devices the scan task is assigned to.
Fixed: In some instances, Tasks were not being deleted by the user in the console.
Fixed: Avast Antivirus on Mac OSX will not automatically activate if no license has been activated in the console.
Fixed: Freeze when XML is uploaded into Transfer from other consoles tab.
Fixed: Device filtering not showing all devices.
Fixed: Some upgrade failed issue when upgrading from older console to newer console.
Fixed: some Typos in German and Czech Language.
Fixed: Reload button in header of widget will show text when there is no data available to refresh.
Fixed: Ability to open the On-Premise Console when installed on a Turkish Windows 7 device.
Avast Business Antivirus Version 18.6
Along with our 6.0 Cloud Console Release, we have also released Avast Business Antivirus Client Version 18.6 which introduces some enhancements and bug fixes!
Client refuses to download policy from the on premises console, because it tries to contact the on premises console via the proxy.
It should not be up to our proxy server to redirect traffic internally, there should be a very simple option in the settings for the client to bypass the proxy for local addresses
Installing on a desktop OS (Windows 10).
The rule for PostgreSQL in Firewall doesn’t get transfered to the local AV client correctly. The BMC isn’t accessable after that. Only completely removing the AV client helps.
The client doesn’t register with the BMC anyways. BMC keeps complaining that zero machines are in the network.
We have this issue at a customer who spent several hours in the meantime with this issue and is getting really unsatisfied. I can absolutely reproduce this erroneous behaviour, the test is very simple. Any suggestion why the ruleset doesn’t get downloaded and properly applied during Avast BMC Agent/AV Client installation? And why does the client not activate and register?
UPDATE 12.09.2018 13:00h: Creating an installer which uses a rule set which has firewall as “not installed” leads to a working BMC after installing the client on the same machine with desktop OS. Unfortunately, the error message “There are still no machines in your network available” remains. The client doesn’t get activated it seems. As I cannot run a full-blown test - when installing clients on other machines, will those connect to the BMC or is it an issue which needs to be fixed?
Update 13.09.2018 16:15h: It’s something weird about name resolution in Avast Business. When just using the IP address for the BMC installation, the then created client installs properly, connects properly, gets activated properly. This can be observed in AVG 18 Business as well - the old mechanism works for resolving the Admin Console, but for resolving the Update Proxy address, another mechanism is used which fails the same way. There using the IP address directly helps, too. This is something which developßment should definately look into.
If you stumble upon the same issue:
Open editor with right click, run as Administrator.
Open C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Management Console\console\config\application-user-config.yml
Replace the host name for the BMC with the IP address, save, reboot machine (or restart services like MCPostgreSQL and so on)
Create new installers, uninstall the existing Avast clients, install with the new packages. They can connect and activate successfully.
One step to the solution of this issue:
In my test I can recreate this situation with a virtual machine which uses the domain controller as DNS server. The domain DNS doesnÄt know about the hostname of the VM, so it cannot resolve the IP address.
Using PING, another mechanism is used for resolving the host name - hosts, WINS, DNS in that order it seems. This happily resolves the IP and makes a connection possible.
So the name resolving mechanism lacks fallback to WINS/hosts, it seems.
When will this be available / where can I find the settings?
2. Scan your network via Active Directory – You can add in your Domain, Username and Password of your Active Directory that will allow the Avast Business On-Premise Console to scan for devices through Active Directory and provide a list of these devices
After entering a username and password and logging into the console, I need to enter a license before I can do any configuration. However when the console needs to go through a proxy for Internet access how do I go about configuring this?
I am unable to get into general settings without adding a license first, which I can’t do without setting the proxy. How do I get around this?