Updating Symanec 10 Clients with new servername

Recently we had to change the server that Symantec Enterprise 10 ran on, and forgot to tell the clients where it should go for updates after the old server was dismantled. Initially it looked like we had to uninstall/reinstall the Symantec Client on our desktop computers, but after a bit of searching I found this document from Symantec. The support article outlines how you can re-establish communications between the Symantec Server and the Clients, by copying the GRC.DAT to the client. It was still very much a manual job, having to copy a file from the server to each of the clients and wait until the client picks up the changes. So, I whipped up this small vbs script to automate the process for me, and ran that on all the clients as a logon script.

' Update Symantec 10 clients with new settings
'***************************************************************************

Set objFile = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

sRemoteGRCPath = "\\server\share\GRC.DAT"

sLocalSAVPath = objShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%ALLUSERSPROFILE%")_
& "\"_
& "Application Data\Symantec\Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition\7.5\"
	
objFile.CopyFile sRemoteGRCPath, sLocalSAVPath, True
'*****************************************

It should work "out-of-the-box" if you remember to change the sRemoteGRCPath variable to contain your actual server paths. All it does it basically to copy the config file from a file share and into the correct locat directory. After that it takes a few minutes for the Symantec client to pick up the changes. After I ran the script at work for a couple of days, all my desktop clients were connected to the new server and there was no need to reinstall.

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel