The constant struggle that IT people face in Africa is that there seems to be just enough internet availability for viruses to spread rapidly, but not enough internet availability to get the tools to fight the viruses.  USB drives are excellent ways of sharing information and of course viruses go with it.  Some of our language project staff are able to get to an Internet Cafe where they pick up a virus and then take it back to the office where it proceeds to infect all of the other computers.

Getting antivirus updates to those same computers has proven a bit more difficult.  On one hand it is impossible to get all of the project computers to the Internet Cafe to update them.  On the other the update files you could get off of AVG's website are way too large (about 40MB) to be able to realistically download over these slow connections.

At the same time that I was considering these problems, we upgraded to the AVG 8.5 administrator console and update server.  This update server is strictly a proxy server and so will only download an update file if a computer requests it.  We have computers that come in from remote offices and project offices so we need the larger updates.  Our internet connection overnight is faster and can handle the large files, but during the day this was difficult, so we need to download the large files at night.

So as any good network administrator would do, I wrote a script.  It uses an excellent little program called WGet to download the AVG update control files.  Then it parses the files to find the updates that are for a computer that is about two weeks out of date.  Back to WGet to download these files over a slow and unreliable connection.

The script can handle the following types of updates:

(f) Full - This is a full download of the virus definition updates.  Use this update on new installations of AVG or on a computer that has not been updated in quite a while.  You may want to run this about once a month just to make sure that all of the machines are updating well. This download is approximately 40MB but is getting bigger every day.

(p) Program - This is a program only update.  AVG releases program updates on a semi-regular basis.  These updates are important as they may increase AVG's ability to find viruses in ways that it could not do before.  You should run this update about once a month. This download is approximately 40MB.

(w) Weekly Partial - This is a subset of the virus definition updates that are downloaded in (f) above.  Because it is a partial download the file size is much smaller.  These should be done at least once a week or at a minimum every two weeks.  If you have gone for more than two weeks without doing a "Weekly Partial" update, then you should do the full update above.  This download is approximately 2MB. 

It can also be modified to help the AVG proxy server by downloading several of the smaller files at off-peak hours.  There are instructions for this in the README file.

The script can be downloaded below for either AVG Network Edition or AVG Free.  It is designed to be able to be run from a pen drive taken to an Internet Cafe or as a scheduled task on a server.

AVG Update Script - Network Edition
AVG Update Script - Free