Global Updating

[m1kew1lson]

Can Someone explain "Global Updating" to me. I have read through the online articles on mcafee's site, as well as the manual about a dozen times.
Do I have to configure a Superagent repository?
You have to enable the superagent on every computers policy?
I'm kinda lost and would love a little guidance on this feature.

 

[simonjcook]

As I understand it, Global updating is a sort of push technology.
Under ePO 2.x and lower each individual agent reported in periodically and pulled it's it updates according to scheduled update tasks.
If you had an emergency you could set up new policies, immediate update tasks and wake up all the nodes.
This is fine during working hours and if you are constantly monitoring the epo server.

With global updating you designate one or more nodes as SuperAgents.
When the SuperAgent updates itself it will send out an agent wake-up call to to all other agents on the same subnet.
This affectively accellerates the deployment of updates to the nodes and is very useful for out-of-hours update releases.
It also reduces the amount of manual intervention required.

You need one superagent per subnet so that it can reach all the nodes it can see.
Depending on your network topology you may want to also make the superagent a repository.
This is particularly useful where you have low bandwidth links between the superagent and the epo server.

 

[NickFerrar]

Yeah I'm trying to decide whether to use Global Updating or not myself.

From what I've looked up the answers to your questions would be:
1). No you don't need to configure super agent repositories in order to use super agents.
2). You enable the super agent policy on only the computers you wish to designate as super agents (1 or 2 per subnet).

I can see they offer a big advantage but only if you reduct the agent polling. My agents current poll the repository every 5 minutes so I don't see super agents as giving me much advantage. However if I use them it would allow me to drastically reduce the polling interval and rely on global updating to get new DATs pushed out. The thing I still need to find out is just how much traffic do update polls generate (assuming there is no new DAT), I'd guess it's very little.

One doc on global updating also mentions the distributed repositories update as soon as the master is changed - this would be useful to rather than relying on scheduled incremental replication (mines currently running every 20 mins). We've found in the past even a 10-20 minute gap in virus protection can be problem if there's a mass mailer going around etc.

Are there any articles on recommended agent update/clean up tasks/repository sync schedules?