Let's say you don't have an Internet connection at your workplace, but you have a local network. And on some of the computers in the local network, the anti-virus databases are periodically updated. You can, of course, copy the databases to your computer every day and manually update them. Or you can spend 15 minutes once to set up the automation of this process, and forget about it for a long time.
Let's consider the task using the Dr. Web anti-virus as an example. Although this solution is suitable for any antivirus that allows you to download anti-virus databases separately from the program and cannot update the databases over the local network.
The whole algorithm comes down to four simple steps:
- create a folder on the local computer where the anti-virus database will be stored;
- create a script for automatic copying of fresh databases from a remote computer to a local one;
- create a task in the task scheduler and configure its periodic execution;
- tell the antivirus where to get updates.
Let's create a folder on our computer into which the databases will be copied from the conditional server. For example:
Now let's create a script (program) that will copy anti-virus databases from a remote computer in the local network to the local computer.
In any text editor, create a file “copy_bases.bat” with the following content:
Here “server” is the name of the remote computer on the network where the anti-virus databases and the network path to them are stored. Lines starting with double colons (“::”) are comments. They are not readable by a computer, but tell the user the purpose of certain lines of code.
The script shows two different options for copying files. One of them requires administrator privileges, the other does not. Try both and find one that works for you. To check it, you need to double-click on the created file. A console window should appear, displaying information about the database copying process.
After the script is created and tested, you need to create a task in the OS task scheduler that will periodically run our script.
Let's open the control panel and go to the "Administration" section. Let's select "Task Scheduler". On the left side of the scheduler, go to the "Task Scheduler Library". In the "Actions" section, select "Create a simple task …" (or right-click on an empty space in the central part of the window and select a similar item).
The task creation wizard will open. Let's enter the name of the task, for example "Copying Dr. Web anti-virus databases". Click "Next".
Now let's set the frequency of the task launch. We will indicate the appropriate option and click "Next".
Let's set up the task launch time and move on.
Let's set the action for the task - "Start the program".
And in the next step of the wizard, we will indicate the path to our script “copy_bases.bat”.
Once again, make sure that all task settings are set correctly and click "Finish". The quest should appear at the end of the quest list.
The last thing left to do is configure the anti-virus program so that it updates its databases from the correct directory. We go to the antivirus settings in the section concerning updates, and specify the path to the folder in which we will have fresh anti-virus databases.
The screenshot shows that Dr. Web allows updating from a network folder. However, for some reason this function works poorly. In my local network, for example, the antivirus categorically does not want to update from a directory on a remote computer.
But after the operations done, you can be sure that the anti-virus databases will always be up to date as soon as they are updated on the server.
