Date: 01/18/07 (IT Professionals)    Keywords: virus

EDIT: Temporary solution in comments

If anyone is using Symantec Corporate AV, and have the XDBdown.cmd script set to auto download defs - make sure you check your systems for updates. Mine stopped updating on 1/12.

After googling and checking symantec's site to no avail, I started taking apart the script to find out what was broken.

It looks like Symantec changed providers for their FTP site, and the version of FTP server on the new host does not function the same as the previous version, for which the script was written.

One particular troublesome line does

dir *.xdb chk.lst >>check.txt

On the previous version this would simply get a directory listing of everything named *.xdb, and send it off to a text file to be parsed (extract filename and size)

The new FTP server does not properly support "dir *.xdb" and returns the whole directory listing instead. - thus making the parse not work properly, and you end up downloading a text file instead of the virus defs.


Symantec has been impossible to contact about this, and I found 2 references to this problem in Symantec's newsgroup - which were DELETED (probably by symantec?)


So.. For the time being I'm just going to download the files manually. I'll give symantec a few days to work something out and if not I'll just modify the script to properly parse out the xdb file.

Just a heads up, normally this thing updates itself and I don't even bother looking at it - I'd hate to have someone be on ancient virus defs while all along thinking the machine was updating automagically.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/itprofessionals/50573.html