PROBLEM

ArcGIS GeoEvent Server fails to launch on servers running McAfee Enterprise Suite Anti-Virus

Last Published: November 13, 2020

Description

One component of the McAfee Enterprise Suite, the on-access scanner, has been shown to prevent the proper installation and startup of ArcGIS GeoEvent Server. This antivirus processor is intended to actively scan any files in use, but when working with highly compressed archive files, such as the JAR files used by GeoEvent Server, multiple time-out failures can occur while waiting for the scans to complete.
When time-out failures occur, McAfee antivirus software may return the following error:

Error:
The scan of FILENAME has taken too long to complete and is being cancelled. Scan engine xxxx and DAT version is xxxx

Cause

McAfee has previously documented this behavior in McAfee Knowledge Center Technical Article KB55869: Explanation of why scan time-outs occur:
"File extensions such as .jar, .chm, .cab, and .zip are all archive files that typically use a very high compression. To scan these archives, each file must be extracted from the archive. This can use a large amount of memory depending on the type of data in the archive and how well it compresses."
Depending on several factors, including file type, if no time-out mechanism is used, it may take up to several hours for scans to finish and for files become accessible again. Time-out mechanisms are intended to prevent lengthy periods of inaccessibility by stopping scans that take longer than the configured time limit.
This issue may effect other antivirus products performing similar scans.

Solution or Workaround

To facilitate the installation and startup of GeoEvent Server, disable the time-out mechanism or set exclusions for all of GeoEvent Server's necessary files in the following default installation paths:

C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Server
C:\ProgramData\Esri\GeoEvent
C:\Users\arcgis\AppData

McAfee discusses alternate ways around this behavior including disabling the archive scans, adding the explicit files to an allowed list, and excluding all similar files from scanning in McAfee Knowledge Center Technical Article KB58727: Slow performance with Java-based applications.

Article ID:000012517

Software:
  • ArcGIS Server

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