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Software of the Month Club (Business) 1998 January
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Software of the Month Club - Business Shareware (Volume 245) (January 1998).iso
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dos
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utility
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imaster
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net.txt
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1997-02-27
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6KB
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115 lines
USING INTEGRITY MASTER ON A NETWORK
The following suggestions come from users of Integrity Master on a
variety of different local area networks (including Novell, LanManager,
Banyan and Lantastic). The details vary slightly but the following
procedure should allow you to get benefit with minimum work.
The benefits of this procedure are:
1) You can run SetupIM only once to get IM installed for most users,
yet anyone who has special needs can configure IM to work exactly
the way they want by running SetupIM on their workstation.
2) Since there's only one copy of IM.EXE and SetupIM.EXE, you can
quickly update everyone's software by doing a single copy
operation.
3) Any files that are transferred from workstation to workstation can
easily have their integrity verified since all workstations share
a common integrity data encryption format.
4) Each workstation will automatically maintain a complete change
history in the form of the report files on that workstation. This
facilitates centralized problem solving; if anything stops working
on that workstation, the report files provide a complete change log
to track down exactly what was changed, added, or deleted.
SUGGESTED INSTALLATION:
1) Copy IM*.* and SetupIM.EXE to a directory on a server which is
included in the DOS path of all workstations on the LAN. It's best
if LAN access rights do not allow the workstations to write to this
directory.
(If your LAN is configured without shared executable directories,
just copy IM.EXE to a directory on the DOS path of each
workstation).
2) Run SetupIM (new install) on a workstation that has the most common
configuration on the LAN. What matters here is the organization of
the disks on the workstation. By this I mean the physical
partitioning of the hard drives. If the first disk is usually
partitioned as two logical drives, choose a PC with that
arrangement. An arrangement that is a superset of another is the
best choice. In other words, if your most common configuration is
to have two floppy drives with the first hard drive partitioned as
two logical drives, choose such a PC. But if some of these PCs
also have additional hard drives, that's even better. Choose one of
the PCs with the extra hard drives to run SetupIM.
3) Move the IM.PRM file created in step 2 to the shared directory
where the IM.EXE file is located. This allows all PCs that have a
compatible configuration to execute IM and allows you to quickly
upgrade to new versions of IM by simply copying the new IM.EXE file
over the old one.
4) If you have workstations with incompatible configurations or users
with special needs, you can run SetupIM separately on those
workstations (but do not place a copy of SetupIM on the
workstation; simply execute the copy on the server) This will
create an IM.PRM file local to the workstation. The user of that
workstation will still execute the shared copy of IM.EXE but IM
will behave according to the configuration and options information
stored in the local copy of IM.PRM rather than the shared copy.
It's useful to install a batch file in a directory on the DOS path
of the workstation to make sure that the local copy of IM.PRM is
always used. The batch file contains this line:
IM C:\LOCAL\IM.PRM %1 %2 %3 %4 %4 %5 %6
("C:\LOCAL\IM.PRM" could be any disk, directory or file name.)
This procedure allows a single setup for most users but still
allows the flexibility to enable anyone to configure IM exactly
the way they want.
5) Run an Initialize "Entire disk integrity" ("IM /IE") on each
workstation. This will scan the entire PC for known viruses and
also provide full integrity checking for all files. Also initialize
the "CMOS memory". (If you are not interested in integrity checking
but only virus scanning, you can skip this step.)
SUGGESTED USAGE:
1) Configure each workstation so that it runs a daily check in "quick
update" mode. The IMQ.BAT and IMONCE.BAT files contain some
statements that can be inserted into the AUTOEXEC.BAT file or
elsewhere to make sure this happens. Some people prefer to just let
the user of each workstation run a quick update once a day (or
other appropriate interval). The full version of IM comes with
RunMaybe, a program that allows you to execute IM (or any other
program) at any interval you choose. The quick update (quick scan)
will catch viruses as effectively as conventional virus scanning
but it is much, much, faster and optionally provides a complete
change log for the workstation. If you wish to do only
conventional virus scanning, you can substitute a virus scan for
this step ("IM /VO").
2) Each workstation user should use IM to scan or check all new
diskettes and especially all new software. The batch files,
IMSCAN, IMSCANM, and IMSCAND, will scan disks, multiple diskettes,
or single directories respectively.
3) A full integrity check should be run at intervals on each
workstation. This will make sure that the disk is thoroughly
checked and will detect more subtle hardware or software problems
as well as unknown viruses. Once a week seems to be the most
popular interval to run a full check.