Applying Superdat From Network Associates

Automatically upgrading Network Associates Netshield, Vshield, or Groupshield is at best spotty using the superdat utility and confuring the FTP site for autoupgrade. I have found a more reliable way is to run a scheduled task on the local system to ftp the file from the remote server and run the file locally. To accomplish this, I use ftp's ability to run a script file.

First I get a directory of the download site and using the NT FOR command I extract the name from the result, create a script file dynamically using the name I recovered from the download site, and check to see if the file exists in my local upload directory.

If the file is the same, I do not download the existing file. If the file is newer, I build a script file for the new download and run ftp with the script to download the file and run the file locally. I even capture the stndout of the ftp process to a log file which I later combine with the superdat.log to get a picture of the process for troubleshooting.

Using this method, a local scheduled task could nightly check for updates from your desired ftp site and if a new file were found, the new file would update your Network Associates .dat files and engine in one step.

This method does not use any additional utility other than the FOR command and FTP.EXE. Since it uses the extended version of the FOR command, this will not work on windows 9.x systems.

This could be extended to use MAPISEND, or some other utility to mail the log to a central mailbox where you could view the results.

Hope you find this helpful.