Anti-Virus Adventures

Denny Cherry wrote a blog post recently discussing whether to run anti-virus software on Sql Server machines. He said you should and I agree. It is just too risky not to run anti-virus with all of the notebook computers coming in and out of the office. The post did remind me of something that happened to a Sql Server cluster a few years back was an “if it can happen, it will happen.” The anti-virus vendor pushed out a bad virus signature file that flagged sqlservr.exe as a virus. They realized the mistake and push out a corrected file after the bad one was out for a only short period. Of course our cluster had pulled bad file. Of course sqlservr.exe was found on the passive node and quarrentined. Of course the cluster failed over, or tried to. We were a bit perplexed why sqlservr.exe had disappeared, but figured out where it went and got things running with out too much down time.