I’ve been working on this issue since September 4th with Avast! Technical Support (most recently Che Johnson).
During the process of attempting to resolve this issue, it has been established that if an automatic or streaming virus definition update attempt occurs (and fails) prior to running running VPSUPD.EXE, the VPSUPD.EXE process will fail to install the updated virus definitions.
In order for VPSUPD.EXE to succeed, both automatic and streaming virus definition updates need to be disabled.
Here’s a configuration that has worked for my organization:
[ol]- Configure a Computer Group in the Enterprise Administration Console* with the following settings (NOTE: only those settings I changed from our standard settings are listed):
Policies: avast! Antivirus / Updates
[li]Update from: Second-level mirror: {any server name or IP address that is NOT a mirror}
- VPS Update:
Auto (prevents warnings in the Avast! GUI that Automatic Updates are disabled)
- Program Update:
Manual
- UNCHECK “
If mirror is unreachable, update from the Internet”
Policies: avast! Antivirus / Updates Details
Update Options:
- UNCHECK “
Show notification box after automatic update”
- UNCHECK “
Show notification box if an error occurs”
Auto-update Interval:
- Auto-update every:
30000 minutes
Policies: avast! Antivirus / Cloud services
Streaming Updates:
- UNCHECK “
Enable streaming updates”
These settings prevent Avast! from automatically updating from local or Internet update sources.
Policies: avast! Antivirus / Password
Protected Areas:
This setting prevents end-users from manually clicking “Update engine and virus definitions” (NOTE: This will only work if your configuration is set as password-protected to begin with!)
[/li]
Since the affected systems have probably already tried to update automatically, they’ll be in a “failed” state and will not update even if VPSUPD.EXE is manually run; a reboot ensures that the updates do not automatically take place.
- Apply
VPSUPD.EXE either manually or via automated scripting/deployment system
Since it’s an executable, you might have to get creative in scripting the update if your deployment system doesn’t handle executables well.
- Verify via EAC* that the updates are being applied.
In my experience, there have been several systems that refused to update even after taking all of these steps; usually, the systems that have failed manual VPSUPD.EXE updates all show multiple “YYMMDD##_stream” folders in %ProgramFiles%\AVAST Software\Avast\defs. The only fix for those systems is a reinstall with an up-to-date installation package.[/ol]
*: I have no idea if SOA contains these same features; modify as necessary to apply these settings via SOA.
YMMV.
–
Troy
Systems Administrator
Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco
