Enterprise Library + MailScanner

[Martin Sapsed]

Julian Field wrote:
>> Sophos has a replacement for their Enterprise Manager called
>> Enterprise Library, and it now supports Linux (and other
>> *nix and Novell) instead of just Windows clients.  How
>> difficult would it be to have MailScanner update Sophos
>> from a CID or a web CID?
>>
>> Or is it a bad idea to automaticaly upgrade the engine?
>
> The only time I ever automatically upgraded the engine, it broke SAVI. I
> had to rebuild the perl SAVI module to get it to work again.
> So I'm a little wary of going down that path.

I've been using EM Library to update the copy of Sophos I use on my
Linux MailScanner testbed for some time now as I was trying out the beta
version. It appears to run ok and has upgraded the engine at least once
while I've been using it.

I cobbled a perl script to use the same lock file as Julian's autoupdate
prog while the update ran (or at least I think I did!) but it could
probably do with more error checking.

Basically there is a script in the EM distribution of Sophos for *ix
which maintains a copy of the CID and if anything changes, it updates
the cache and then runs Sophos' install.sh. The script reads some
settings from a config file in /etc so you can "MailScanner-ise" the
folders it uses and it appears to work ok but this is on a lightly
loaded server. I'm contemplating setting it up on our 3 Solaris mail
hubs but haven't had the bottle yet!

Given Julian's comments about SAVI, maybe using EM in conjunction with
SAVI isn't wise but if you're just using sweep then it might be of
interest, if you're already running EM anyway. We seem to have had a
couple of cases where the mail hubs didn't get their engine upgraded
promptly enough and hence were unable to get the latest updates with
Julian's script - I could do without that happening again...!

Julian - have you looked at this stuff at all?? Would you be interested
in looking at the scripts etc?

Cheers,

Martin

--
Martin Sapsed
Information Services               "Who do you say I am?"
University of Wales, Bangor             Jesus of Nazareth