Today I have been mostly... installing Sophos

For several months now, one of my servers has been a little overloaded. It is a dual Opteron 248 with 4GB RAM but it has been performing the following roles:

• Exchange 2003 Server (for 1100+ users)
• WSUS Server
• Sophos Enterprise Manager and Library Server
• Print Server (including Print Manager Plus)
• Retrospect backup

As you can imagine, it didn't like doing all this (especially the huge email database combined with the two instances of MSDE for WSUS and Sophos). I decided that the easiest thing to move was Sophos and the re-homing coincided nicely with the release of the latest release of the admin software. Having downloaded the package from the Sophos website, I unpacked the files and set about installing it my second DC. All was going very well until the installer tried to set up MSDE. No matter what I tried I could not get MSDE to install... even when I tried to install it from the redistributable fresh from MS. It was most odd; the MSI installer crept along until a couple of blocks from the end and then sort or re-wound with no explanation other than a message in the event log saying that the MSI installation had failed! After this had annoyed me for nearly an hour, I decided to approach the problem from a different angle... enter SQL Server 2005 Express. I installed this and then just told the Sophos installer to use this instance rather than installing MSDE... easy as! After then going through all the EM Library options, I left the server downloading the Sophos AV packages for 2000/XP, OS X and Linux over lunch and upon my return all was well. The new version of the EM Console works well and all the installations went flawlessly. I was particularly impressed by the new policy-based system. Time will tell how well this continues to work and I must admit not all of my machines were on.