McAfee working in CLUSTERed environment?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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Hi all,

Working at a client site today that is licensed to use McAfee. I’ve done a

search on the forum and haven’t seen any postings that talk about using McAfee

IN A CLUSTER.

I’ve got a call into McAfee to determine their stated compatibility with 6.01

but given the tone of alot of what I read about McAfee in this forum, I’d feel

much better knowing that someone out there is using it successfully in "the

real world".

Particulars:

Domino 6.01 CF1

Windows/2000 SP3

Domino Clustering

Approx. 800 users/server

Thanks for reading this post and thanks especially if you take the time to

respond.

Richard Echeandia

Cool Stuff for Lotus Notes, Inc.

http://www.CoolNotesStuff.com

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Subject: Not on D6, but I have it running

I have McAfee GroupShield for Domino 5.2.1 running on a set of four clustered web servers (no Notes access), and it works great. The only thing you might do to improve performance is to go in the Cluster db directory and disable cluster replication for the McAfee databases (typically there’s no real need for this, and I believe McAfee recommends this). Let the normal backup scheduled replication handle these databases.

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Subject: McAfee working in CLUSTERed environment?

If you’re talking McAffee GroupShield, I can tell you this:

We were not able to get GS installed on multiple servers using the “hub server” method that McAffee suggests. We were R5 over a WAN. It would NEVER pull the databases from the “hub server”. (We also tried it on a local server, same issue, so it wasn’t bandwidth.)This went on for months. I finally got it working on my own. What did work for us was this:

  1. Install GS on each server as if it were the first/standalone install.

  2. Copy all the configuration documents from the 2nd server and paste into the appropriate databases on the “hub server”. (Some views say you can’t paste - just paste to another view in same database.)

  3. Replace the GS databases on the 2nd server with databases from the “hub”.

  4. Restart 2nd server. It runs GS!!

  5. Repeat for additional servers.

This was 2 yrs ago. I have not seen any significant re-releases of Groupshield, so chances are that problem is still there.

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Subject: RE: McAfee working in CLUSTERed environment?

This was probably due to an error in the setup of the initial database. I found this, too, in GSD 5.0a HF4. The problem was that the initial setup did not put the group LocalDomainServers in the role GSDUser. After doing the hub install, just go to the main configuration database and make sure LocalDomainServers is in that role (it’s the only one in the list), and it will work fine.

Also, 5.2.1 is a significant upgrade, and is generally worth the effort. One of the nice, new features is that it can finally act on infected attachments in QuickPlace. The downside is that it’s a performance bottleneck for the entire QuickPlace server, so I’ve disabled it on that box. I’m working through this with McAfee right now.

This upgrade also includes the ability to upgrade the scan engine via the updates database.

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Subject: McAfee working in CLUSTERed environment?

We have been running Groupshield in R5 clusters for years and now currently in an R6 cluster for quite some time. As others have suggested I would use version 5.2.1