Marking Shares As Null Session Shares - McAfee MANAGEMENT EDITION 2.5 Administrator's Manual

Updating Your Anti-virus Software

Marking shares as null session shares

All repository shares created by the Management Edition program are
automatically marked as null session. Therefore, the only time that you must
manually mark a share as null session is when you have moved a share
location or have inherited an existing share.
Before you can begin installing software updates to a member machine, you
must mark this relocated or inherited share containing the updates as a null
session share, so that the local system service can access it. When the
Management Edition program installs the VirusScan program, it installs the
local Task Manager (which performs .DAT updates) and Alert Manager as
local system services, instead of services running as named accounts. The Task
Manager cannot copy .DAT files from a normal share; for a local system to
access a share, you must mark the share as a null session share. Similarly, the
Alert Manager cannot access the folder to which alerts are reported, unless the
share is marked as a null session share.
Follow these steps:
1. Go to the machine hosting the share.
2. Click Start on the Windows taskbar.
3. Type regedt32 (not regedit, because that displays the contents of the
4. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\
5. Add the share names (e.g., AMFOLDER) to the NullSessionShares key
138 Management Edition
NOTE: For the Alert Manager, first create a share pointing to the
Alert Manager folder to which alerts are reported. For example:
NET SHARE AMFOLDER=C:\PROGRAM FILES\
NETWORK ASSOCIATES\NETSHIELD\ALERT
registry in hexadecimal and is more difficult to work with).
Services\LanManServer\Parameters.
to mark them as null session shares.