Anti-virus Scan Exclusions

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It is not recommended that Geo SCADA runs on systems which do not have the required exclusions configured. Doing so risks Geo SCADA database corruption and ongoing performance problems.

Anti-virus products will cause problems with Geo SCADA unless certain exclusions are configured. The "on access" scan in anti-virus products can temporarily lock files used by Geo SCADA, either having the effect of slowing Geo SCADA down whilst it waits for the scan of that file to finish or causing the file save to be aborted resulting in incomplete database files. In addition, scheduled scans may cause a more general performance issue during a scan of the disk due to the large number of files of the Geo SCADA database having to be scanned.

If Geo SCADA is unable to successfully write to a file the database will either go into a safe state or result in the database not being saved to disk correctly, depending on the file.

Backup and archive times can be drastically improved without having anti-virus products scanning each file it needs to read from the database and write out to its new location.

To find which external processes are accessing Geo SCADA files use the Process Monitor utility from SysInternals. Set the filter to default, add a new filter for the path to include database locations on disk and then add a second filter to exclude "DBServer.exe". The resultant list should be blank, any entries shown should indicate other processed accessing the database's files and these may impact performance and stability

The following directories should be added to any anti-virus product installed including the default Windows anti-malware products. Specific directories used on your system can be found in the Location section of the Geo SCADA Server Config tool, or within relevant object configurations in the database:

• Program Files installation directory (including files and sub directories)

• Program Files (x64) directory (on 64 bit operating systems)

• Database Files directory (including ClearSCADAConfig.dat, ClearSCADAData.dat, ClearSCADAMetadata.xml and all temp files created in the database files directory)

• History directory (including files and sub directories)

• Journal directory (including files and sub directories)

• Configuration Changes directory (including files and sub directories)

• Historic Files directory(including files and sub directories)

• Data Files directory (including files and sub directories)

• Alarm Summary directory (including files and sub directories)

• Archive directory

• Backup directory when using the Backup object within Geo SCADA

Under the history, journal, configuration changes and alarm summary directories, sub-directories will be created for each item that has data. If your anti-virus product does not support wildcards in exclusions, then add the entire history, journal and configuration changes directories to the exclusion list.

The above exclusions are recommended for the "on access"/"real time" scan. Scheduled scans, which are usually daily or once a week, should also have these exclusions added with the exception of the Program Files exclusion.

Also see Online Defragmenter Exclusions

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