More Anti-Virus Software for WHS
In my last post about compatible anti-virus software for Windows Home Server, we came to the conclusion that NOD32 was the best paid for option and that ClamWin was probably the best FREE option available.
Since than I have tried and tested a few more anti-virus products and here is the outcome.
- Avast 4 Server Edition. Good but expensive at $399 for the one licence.
- Avast 4 Small Business Server. Only available in 5+ licences for $199.75. Less expensive than the sever edition but cheaper alternatives are available.
- Sophos Anti-Virus SBE 2.0. Again only available for 5+ users @ £148 ($295)
- AVG Anti-Virus Network edition. Available for 2 computers @ $62.95. This is extremely good value. And works extremely well.
- Avira AntiVir Server. Only available for 10+ users @ €320 ($430) Very Expensive!
- McAfee Enterprise AV 8.0i-8.5i. Expensive, but works well.
All pricing is for a 1 year subscription
As you can see apart from AVG the least expensive is Avast 4 Small Business Server which is still a staggering $199.75. Luckily for us in this round up AVG Anti-Virus Network Edition comes to the rescue at the staggering price of only $62.95 and that also allows you to install it on to 2 PCs. It is also available as a 2 year subscription at the discounted price of $83.95
So after all this antiviral fun what would I recommend? Well if you can afford it go for NOD32 Enterprise Edition @ £90 £154. It is very light on resources and has an excellent detection rate. If your money can’t stretch that far go for the AVG Anti-Virus Network Edition. Its excellent value and works extremely well for the money. And if you’re short of cash at the moment give the FREE ClamWin a go.
One of these will stop your Windows Home Server getting an infection, and as I said in the first installment of this series….
“This is what I have come up with so far. Unless YOU know better of course, in which case please let us know!”
UPDATE 1: I wanted to test a few more “home” products and as expected they would not install on Windows Home Server, complaining that it was not a server machine. They were Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6, AVG Anti-Virus Free and AVG Anti-Virus Professional Edition 7.5. Before leaving this test I tried my NOD32 for Windows which I use on my home PCs and it installed! and worked! WOW. I quick call to NOD32 technical support told me that unlike competing anti-virus products NOD32 will NOT check which platform it is being installed onto. This is very good news for you and me, we now have an Anti-Virus product for WHS for only £23 ($46) and as an added bonus NOD32 is light on resources and has one of the best detection rates of all the antiviral products!!!
UPDATE 2: Thanks to Daniel Keller for bringing it to my attention that F-PROT Antivirus for Windows installs and works fine on Windows Home Server. A home use license covers up to five computers, for personal use, in the license holder’s home for $29 (€21.58) or the corporate license for up to 10 computers is $50 (€37.21). A FREE 30 day trial of either is available from their respective pages.
So I now believe that we have joint winners for the BEST anti-virus package for WHS. NOD32 for Windows. A free 30-Day Trial is available from here and the extremely cheap F-PROT Antivirus for Windows.
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I can confirm OneCare does not install. It complains that its not a valid OS.
Another one to add to the list that works, Symantec AntiVirus.
I installed the NOD32 AV for Windows 30 day trial and it seems to be working nicely so far. Runs automatically as a service whether I log in to Admin or not.
Just be sure to NOT activate the IMON-Internet Monitor. After Install you probably could turn off the Outlook and Office Doc monitors. Not really needed in WHS.
Upon Reboot it automatically runs AMON System monitor by scanning all files in the system memory. And this is done on each reboot. The NOD32 system scanner will need setup in the scheduler. Seems like a nice AV so far. I won’t mind the $46 fee at all….
Thanks for the info Philip!
One concern about the NOD32 AMON service. Upon WHS reboot, AMON file change scanner ran through EVERY file on the system and it took 3-DAYS! OMG. Not a huge drain of resources, but I”d like to turn it off. Does this have to run to detect a virus intrusion?
Hi TheJudge,AMON only checks files what have changed since they were last scanned and with WHS using its duplication service the .dat files on the server will appear as if they are changing most of the time, thus the reason it took 3 days.
What you could do is disable the dat files (the file type used for the duplication service) from being scanned in the AMON setup. This should not cause a security problem as the dat files could not be executed by there self on the WHS.
Click on AMON in the NOD32 Control Center on the left, then click setup on the right hand side. On the Detection tab click the Extensions button at the bottom. In the Extension editor that opens click Add and enter dat and then click OK 3 times to return to the desktop.
Philip,
I have 200 gb of shares and 11 gb of pc back ups, but I don’t have duplication turned on yet. So, are the .dat files really still the issue? Is the AMON going to always rescan every file on WHS on Boot up? Last count was 400,000+ files scanned. Whew!
If I turn AMON off….would that prevent the detection of a new infected file coming into WHS? Symantec does not do this scanning and it can tell if a virus comes into the PC environment….
Thanks for the feedback!
Hi TheJudge,
I have spoke to ESET technical support for you and hopefully we have a solution for the long scan! on re-boot.
Click on AMON in the NOD32 Control Center on the left, then click setup on the right hand side. On the Detection tab click the Extensions button at the bottom. In the Extension editor that opens un-tick the “Scan all files” box and un-tick (if ticked) the “Do not scan extensionless files” box also and then click OK 3 times to return to the desktop.
Do NOT turn AMON off as virus’s will not be detected and also make sure IMON is on. You don’t need the pop3 email part of imon but you do need the http checking part of imon working for best protection.
Hi Philip,
Thanks for the info. I’ve set it up we’ll see how it goes.
Three things:
1. After Setting AMON up as above, the list shows file ext it WILL scan. I noticed that there were several missing i.e. jpg, avi, mpg, mpg3, txt, iso. I added those since those are the types of files most of us use and er…ahhh….down load LOL.
2. I thought Nod32 said in the set up NOT to use IMON for a server or there may be conflicts??? Not surfing the net anyway…
3. I already turned off Dmon and Emon as both are not a big concern.
Again, big thanks on the info!
FIndings so far:
After setting AMOM and Imon up with your suggestions it works fine.
But, If I add file extensions to AMON like-MP3, MPG, AVI, JPG, ISO etc…. the server load while AMON is running is sooo high I cannot access several of my large shared folders (videos) from either WHS desktop or from a remote pc. I’ll actually get an access denied error. At first I thought it was a bandwidth issue. I removed the added file extensions from AMON and now I can access my large video shared folders.
Maybe adding those extra file extensions put so much load on caching the large vid folders that my machine could not handle the request to view the folders from a network pc…I guess.
Moral to the story…don’t add more file extensions to AMON.
I installed NOD32 last week. I hit the road and remote access worked fine. I got home yesterday and was having problems accessing Shared Folders. I couldn’t access them from any clients, getting a permissions error. Accessing Shared Folders from the WHS box while logged on locally ALSO generated the permissions error.
So… I uninstalled NOD32 and the problem went away immediately.
Hi Lang Murthy,
It seems that you, I and a few others are having problems with NOD32 on home server. I have spoken to ESET technical support who said that they have not tested their AV product on WHS yet, so have no idea why this is happening. In the meantime any ideas why this is happening anyone?
Hi Philip,
I have no clue what might be the root source of the permissions problem with NOD32. Too bad, because it seems like a nice product. I saw the new post on Avast releasing a WHS specific product. That should be interesting; I use their client software on my clients and have been quite pleased with it.
To get NOD32 to work on WHS you must disable the AMON function, which is a major portion of protection! So, regretfully I uninstalled it today.
Now, I’m testing F-Prot to see how it plays with WHS. So far it seems ok……I’ll keep you posted.
TheJudge,
Please do keep us all updated on your evaluation of F-Prot… that was my next step, after uninstalling NOD32. I’m quite happy letting you be the guinea pig, uh, I mean “main tester”, that’s the ticket! 😉
Lang
TheJudge,
Well, I guess I couldn’t wuss out on you, so I d/l’d F-Prot, installed it, and am running first scan as I type. I, too, will report back on “how it goes.”
Lang
F-Prot Update:
It seemed to work ok, but it really lagged down my WHS. Did not seem to use a lot of memory, but it runs two processes. One is a server.exe that randomly activates and boggs down my machine.
Cons: F-Prot caused Console on clients to take over a minute to open. Dramatically slowed the overall performance of the machine. But so do most AV programs. It would not scan unless logged into the Admin account. May have to adjust the Service settings or something. Not sure.
Pros: It seemed to work. Simple to set up. Found two trojan droppers in an exe file I’ve never opened yet! Inexpensive. If I had a faster WHS I’d leave it installed.
I’m now moving on to AVG Network Edition or AVG File Server Edition….keep ya posted.
Thanks for the info on F-Prot. Please keep us posted on your AVG adventures.
Ok, after a month plus… It seems the AVG Network Edition works great! You do have to configure it to run in the background and auto update when not logged on. I’ll post the email I got from their tech rep later.
My trial has expired and since it is the ONLY AV to actually work without lagging, blocking WHS, I will be spending some $$ this week to buy a license.
As promised, here is the email that explains how to set up AVG 7.5 to work without a user logged in to WHS:
There is no need to set up any *.exe file in the “Windows Service”, because the installation of the AVG 7.5 automatically add the components which are needed for the admin/station to be communicate each other even if the user is logged off.
It is necessary to create the update/test plan for all users if you want to schedule AVG update/test plan to run when there is no user logged on the computer (unfortunately at this time, all scheduled tasks are run only when a user is logged in) :
1) Please disable preset update/test plan this way:
* Open AVG 7 -> menu “Program” -> select “Switch to Advanced Interface”
* Open “Scheduled tasks” with double-click on it (or you can use function key)
* Open “Update plan in Basic mode”/”Test plan in Basic mode” with double-click on it
* Uncheck the “Periodically check for Internet updates”/”Periodically start scheduled antivirus test” item
* Confirm with the “OK” button
2) Create your own update/test plan:
* Press the “New schedule” button in “Scheduled tasks” window
* Choose “Update”/”Test” from the “Schedule” list
* Choose the update type/prefered test from the “Schedule options” list
* Please check the “Schedule for all users” item
* Set the other scheduled task options according to your needs and confirm with “OK” button
With this configuration the update/test will be performed even if there is no user logged on the computer. Please note that the update will be successful only if it is set to update from the Internet or local folder. It is not possible to run update from a network directory if no user is logged in.
If the AVG client application is connected to the AVG Remote Administration it is necessary to create the update plan via AVGADMIN. Please check FAQ #212 for more details.
Thank you for cooperation.
Asen Nikolov
AVG Technical Support
Thanks.
Just an update for you good folks. I’ve just tried to install NOD32 for Windows on my home server and it came up saying that it’s not for a server OS. They’ve obviously changed the install to check the OS so you can no longer install it.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the update.
Dear Philip,
On my search for Antivirusprog for my WHS I can tell you that Avast has now a special application for WHS that is not so expensive $ 39,41. So, that is good news i think!
Thelly
Wouldn’t Symantec Antivirus 10.2 see it as a Server environment and just work? <– Will be testing tonight.
I just tested out CA Anti-Virus 2007 it came free with my Road Runner account. Seems to run pretty good. Thought I would throw out another Anti-Virus product
Here is one i have used since it was in beta F-Secure Home Server Security 2009 and is $50
http://www.f-secure.com/en_US/products/home-office/home-server-security/index.html
If you look at the Avast page and use the calculator you can get Avast for WHS and as many PCs as needed, all very reasonably.
Jim and others that claim Avast support WHS… I searched their website, top to bottom. There is nowhere on that website that dclaims support for WHS.
This is what I found for avast home server edition.
http://www.avast.com/eng/pricelist-windows-home-server.html
Hi
About Avast. Then buy there familiy pack:
1 license for WHS
10 Pro license
72 euro for 1 year – thats cheap I say
http://www.avast.com/eng/avast-professional-family-pack.html
/Jakob
I am running BitDefender 2010 on my WHS.. 1st year was free from there website for signing up for some credit check crap & then immediately calling to cancel it.. Doesnt seem as clean as the Avast I Run on my Win7 Box& I Will probably be getting the avast family pack later.
Just thought I would let you all know that I have been running Vipre Antivirus on my WHS. I am running the Home Site license version and it has been working great so far. One year subscription is $49.95 for all computers in the house (no limit).
Thanks Peter! I was hoping Vipre would work with WHS. It’s definitely worth the site license then.
I tried installing VIPRE on my WHS and I could no longer access it. Had to do a server recovery 🙁 My guess is that as soon as it booted up the firewall kicked in and it wanted to know whether to allow access to my home network… but since there is no way to access WHS directly, I couldn’t give it the OK.
Can anyone tell me how to install VIPRE on a mediasmart WHS?
Thanks!
ClamWin Free Antivirus runs on Windows Home Server and is FREE! It detected the same virus in the same files that Avast detected during a software folder scan from across the network. Did I mention free? It’s FREE!