McAfee VIRUSSCAN 4.5 - User's Guide download pdf (Page 6)

About the McAfee Agent

The term

agent

is used in three different contexts:

• McAfee Agent

• SuperAgent

• Agent Handler

McAfee Agent

The McAfee Agent is the client-side component that provides secure communication between

McAfee managed products and ePolicy Orchestrator. The agent also provides local services to

these products and to products developed by McAfee's Security Innovation Alliance partners.

While enabling products to focus on enforcing their policies, the McAfee Agent delivers services

that include updating, logging, reporting events and properties, task scheduling, communication

and policy storage.

The agent is installed on the systems you intend to manage with ePolicy Orchestrator. Systems

can only be managed by ePolicy Orchestrator with an agent installed.

While running silently in the background, the agent:

• Gathers information and events from managed systems and sends them to the ePO server.

• Installs products and upgrades on managed systems.

• Enforces policies and schedules tasks on managed systems and sends events back to the

ePO server.

• Updates security content such as the DAT files associated with McAfee VirusScan.

SuperAgent

A SuperAgent is an agent that can broadcast wake-up calls to other ePO agents located on the

same network broadcast segment (usually identical with a network subnet). Each SuperAgent

then pings the agents in its subnet. Agents located in a segment with no SuperAgent do not

receive the wake-up call. This is an alternative to sending ordinary agent wake-up calls to each

agent in the network, and the advantage is that it can distribute network traffic.

SuperAgents can also serve as the repository of distributable software and updates for those

agents in its broadcast segment. Additionally, the agent's global updating feature relies entirely

upon SuperAgent wake-up calls to perform its function.

Agent Handler

An Agent Handler is the ePO component responsible for managing communication between

agent and server. Beginning with ePolicy Orchestrator 4.5, Agent Handlers can be installed on

other computers to provide fault tolerant and load-balanced communication to many agents,

including geographically distributed agents.

McAfee Agent software version 4.5 Product Guide6

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McAfee VIRUSSCAN 4.5 - User's Guide Page 6