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Norman Virus Control

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Norman Virus Control (NVC), an anti-virus package for companies, can be used to protect clients, fileservers, mail servers and IIS Web servers. It also includes a basic firewall for servers and workstations, and is available for various platforms like Novell NetWare, Win NT/2000/XP Prof/ME/98, Linux, OS2 and DOS. When we tested the software, we used Win 2000 Server as Domain Controller and Win 2000 Prof/XP Prof as the clients. If you have a small network with a handful of workstations, you could install the anti-virus directly on them. Alternately, for large implementations, it has an anti-virus deployment toolkit that can install the anti-virus remotely on client machines. 

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During our testing,

it detected all virus-infected files, even those that were in compressed zip form

There are different remote deployment tools for Win 98/ME and Win 2000/XP Pro. The former requires login scripts, while the latter uses a separate tool called Ndisk, which scans all machines on the network and shows the status of machines it can be deployed on. The process for setting up the deployment, however, is a little complicated. At first, we got errors

while uncompressing the anti-virus files to client machines. We managed to sort it out by checking the company’s website and downloading NVC administrative tools. Once this was done, deployment took less than 10 secs on each workstation. 

The anti-virus supports automatic updates, wherein the server downloads them and automatically distributes them to the clients. The virus scanner claims to detect all the latest viruses, Trojans and worms. It can also be configured to check virus and malicious code in your mail. During our testing process, it detected all virus-infected files, including those that were in compressed zip form. The virus-infected files that it couldn’t clean, were quarantined. We also tried the anti-virus on a machine infected with Nimda, and it managed to detect it easily. 

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Snapshot

Price Starts

at Rs 1,500 per user and reduces with additional users; server

license extra
Key

specs
: Remote

distribution of anti-virus, firewall, support for NetWare server,

Exchange and Domino
Cons : Takes

less than 10 secs to deploy on clients
Pros : Initial

configuration for remote deployment complicated
Contact : Acto

Information Systems, Bangalore
Tel : 2282388
E-mail : acto@vsnl.com.

NVC also has a component for MS Exchange, which prevents any virus-infected mail from passing through it. It also lets you exclude .vbs, pif, and lnk (virus scripts) attachments from e-mail. NVC has another useful tool called MINEsweeper, which can be configured to remove unwanted content (such as virus attachments) from e-mail before forwarding them to recipients.

The Bottom Line: Overall, a good anti-virus solution for corporates. 

Sanjay Majumder

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