Full System Scan indicator

Hello Alex,

you are right, it is not indicated. Scheduled scans are also only reported when they have finished. You could submit a feature request of course.

Do others also think it could be useful?

Christian

Without shadow of a doubt it would!

I personally would like something along the lines of a column in SEC showing the percentage of the scan has completed - to give a rough indication of how long is left - though ANYTHING just to say it is in progress/finished would be a good addition.

Agreed! A progress indicator would be nice to have. Due to this shortcoming I came up with a homebrew solution: I had to create a separate "Started" container in for each school in which I move all computers where I started a full scan. Else it's impossible to keep track of which computers have been scanned, are scanning and have not been full scanned at all.

Full scanning as far as I understood from digging in the documentation/KBs also has the nice side-effect of checksumming all files and keeping a cache of it... thus enabling subsequent future scans to be much faster.

It would also be very helpful if there was a column which shows the "Last Full (or Scheduled) Scan completed" date. Due to the lack of this I had to create a YYYY-MM folder for each school where I put all full scanned computers.

I second the request for a last complete scan column. Its great having the last updated column - but sometimes the last scan can, in some cases, never have happened!

Ok guys... I have submitted a suggestion stating the need for some type of status/progress indictor when a full system scan is initiated from the console. Will keep you posted with any replies.

R/Alex

I'm late to this topic but support the proposals mentioned above. It is not user-friiendly to inititate a full scan then have to make a note to myself to check that PC hours later to see its status.

Count me in.

I've always thought SEC generally could do with more indicators as to the current state of machines.

My main concern with a feature like this would be excessive network traffic resulting from all the RMS packets getting sent to the console. For instance, I support one client that is in retail, has over 500 stores nationwide (South Africa), connecting to the SEC over 64k diginet lines. Updates alone are already a bit of a problem (when the engine updates happen), so I shudder to think what kind of traffic 12000 endpoints are going to generate when they start spewing RMS packets to the console.

That said, I often have clients ask for that feature... So it would probably be best if you can have it but have the ability to disable it, for slow networks.

Would you rather it be enabled as default though, or need to be manually enabled - out of the box?

In the meantime you can tell if the Scan has started/finished by looking in the logs on the client machine. There are two logs

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Sophos\Sophos Anti-Virus\logs\ Scan my computer.txt

And

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Sophos\Sophos Anti-Virus\logs\Right-Click Scan.txt

The log file tells you all the information you require, but I agree having this information reported to the console would make things far more easier.

Example log file

20100511 094428       Scan 'Scan my computer' started.

20100511 095005       Scan 'Scan my computer' paused.

20100511 095006       Scan 'Scan my computer' aborted.

20100511 095006       Summary of results for scan 'Scan my computer':

                        Items scanned: 184

                        Errors: 0

                        Items quarantined: 0

                        Items dealt with: 0