Following the renewal of our Kaspersky anti virus products for another 12 months, the friendly sales person was also kind enough to point out that the license entitled us to upgrade to the lat[er|est] version, and that the new version supported Windows 7.
Sold !
We were previously running Administration Kit version 6 (6.0.1710) and were pushing out Anti Virus 6 for Workstation (6.0.3.837) to Vista desktops. That particular version of the client would not work under Windows 7, it would cause an exception and the process/service would shutdown (Windows kept going though, well done MS).
During a period of performance issues experienced last year, I had to dial back most of the Kaspersky features and functionality under Vista. The ‘Web Protect’ component increased some page load times to well over a minute if there were a lot of links on a page. And the ‘Proactive Defense’ component (which watches and protects the registry) would fire up so many alerts that just launching any approved application would result in so many popup alerts it resembled one of those naughty web sites with boobs all over them that hi-jack your screen with popups !
So all the components of the Anti Virus application were installed, but the Kaspersky policies were used to deactivate the bits causing problems. The only components left enabled were the ‘File Anti-Virus’ and the ‘Anti-Spy’ features. All the others components were unchecked.
I decided to create a new server instance and install the updated version cleanly onto it rather than upgrade the in place install. This gave me the luxury of migrating computers across to the new version in a more relaxed manner, and also leaving behind any bugs/isssues with the existing version on the old server.
So the new versions now in play are Administration Kit 8 (8.0.2090) and Anti Virus 6 for Workstation MP4 (6.0.4.1424). I have no idea what the MP4 stands for (if anything).
This time, I decided to save time and resources, I would only install the anti virus package components we wished to use, namely file and spyware scanning. So I attempted to modify the package as shown below
av package components
However, it became apparent that when the application was pushed out to the client something was not quite right. No matter what I tried, the policy for the workstation was not being applied. I tried removing and re-installing the AV client, but it did not change anything. Many google searches later did not return anything definative or useful (hence my writing this blog post, maybe someone else also tried to save a bit of disk space and found that their policies no longer worked !?!?).
So I went back to defaults and put all the components back into the package and re-deployed to the workstation. This had the effect that the policy was now being detected and applied to the workstation ?!? So now I just go in and modify the policy to deatcivate the protection components I am not using as per the previous version.
av component configuration
Happy to report that the new MP4 version of the AV client works fine under Windows 7 for both x64 and x86 bit, as well as Vista. CPU and memory utilisation would appear to be greatly reduced (the avp.exe process on my workstation is using a little under 17MB).
I am a little miffed that I had to install all the package components onto the workstation in order for policies to work (especially as I then just use those policies to deactivate over 75% of the products features !).
In summary, if you are having trouble with Kaspersky policies not being applied to AV workstation clients, check to see if you removed any of the components from the deployment package, it may be a factor.
