Believe it or not, this morning I found that the IT departement has installed "Trend Micro Office Scan" on the server. I will contact them to remove it. Do I still need to dump everything thing and load back or this will solve the problem? If I need to dump, what type of dump do you recommend?
On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 8:52 PM, Craig Ringer <cr...@postnewspapers.com.au>wrote: > Patrick Desjardins wrote: > >> I am on Windows Server 2003 and humm I will have to check tommorow morning >> but I do not think any Anti-Virus is scanning. >> > > Sometimes even an antivirus package that has its "realtime protection" > features disabled will still cause problems. This comes back to what Scott > Marlowe said: "A lot of anti-virus packages are dumb as a brick." They often > fail to unload hook DLLs when resident protection is disabled, and sometimes > even keep on scanning, just ignoring the results! (I've seen this multiple > times). > > I remain of the opinion that antivirus software has no place on a database > server. There should be no way a virus can get near it, because you're NEVER > granting users access to it except via the database engine, and the only > hole in the Windows Firewall should be for the database. > > Since this issue keeps on cropping up, I wonder how the other DB vendors > that support Windows handle it? Do antivirus products have standard APIs for > exceptions - "don't scan me" ? If so, isn't that a gaping security hole? And > if not, how do other DBs manage to get anything done when some half-wit > dodgy AV software is installed? Or do the other folks (Oracle etc) just have > these sorts of issues too? > > Proposed FAQ entry: > > --------------------- > Q: I'm getting weird, intermittent errors when starting PostgreSQL or > executing SQL statements. My PostgreSQL server runs on Windows. > > A(1): If you are running a version of PostgreSQL less than 8.3, upgrade. > Remember to dump your database (you can use PgAdmin for this) BEFORE > uninstalling the old version of PostgreSQL. > > A(2): If you have any antivirus software installed, COMPLETELY UNINSTALL it > (at least as a test to see if it is the problem). Many anti-virus packages > are written without considering the needs of databases, and do things that > will interfere with the way a database accesses its files. Some have > implementation problems that mean that even disabling their real-time > protection is insufficient, since they STILL interfere with the database > even when supposedly disabled. Lots of AV packages also cause severe > performance problems with a database even when they appear to work fine. To > see if your antivirus software is causing your problems, completely > uninstall it and reboot your computer before re-testing. > > Q: I'm getting inexplicable network connection errors or network > performance problems with PostgreSQL. My PostgreSQL server runs on Windows. > > A(1): If you are running a version of PostgreSQL less than 8.3, upgrade. > Remember to dump your database (you can use PgAdmin for this) BEFORE > uninstalling the old version of PostgreSQL. > > A(2): If you have any 3rd party firewall software installed, COMPLETELY > UNINSTALL it. Disabling it is not good enough, as many firewall packages > continue to interfere with Windows' networking even when disabled. 3rd party > firewall packages should not be necessary on any version of Windows with a > built-in firewall, and tend to cause more problems than they solve. They are > unsuitable for use on a machine intended for server use. <b>If, after > uninstalling your firewall, you lose your network connection or have other > networking problems</b>, run the following command: > netsh ip interface reset %HOMEPATH%\Desktop\resetlog.txt > which should clean up any mess left by the poorly written firewall > package's failure to cleanly uninstall its self. > > > > [Needs link to section in server admin docs "PostgreSQL Server > Administration for Windows" that discusses AV scanning, isolated server, > firewall, datadir location, permissions, etc - I'm happy to write at least a > basic version of this if folks here agree it'd be useful.] > --------------------- > > > > -- > Craig Ringer >
