Virus Protection  

Every computer in the office absolutely must have real time antivirus protection running. There are many different antivirus programs available. We recommend the following product:

Avast: Professional Edition. Licenses are about $30 per computer or about $55 per computer if you get the 3 year service agreement. They let you purchase exactly how many licenses you want. Their software is very slick (it even talks). We are having a much better experience with Avast than we previously had with either Norton or Trend Micro.

Here are the reasons why we do not recommend some other antivirus software: Trend Micro PcCillin: Very difficult to upgrade. Sometimes crashes the computer. Hard to setup. User interface is wierd. Symantec (Norton): Poor customer service. Requires shipping a disk, which they tend to run out of. Product selection is very confusing. McAffee: Do not use. Poorly written. Frequently blocks OD from working properly, so it must be uninstalled from the server. Even if you turn it off, it's not really off. It will keep interfering.

Many antivirus programs have their own software firewall feature. If your antivirus software comes with a firewall or "internet security", then you should turn off or uninstall that component. Instead, use the firewall that comes with Windows XP as described below.

If you still want to use your own firewall, then you MUST unblock port 3306 which is used to access the MySQL database. Each of them has a different way of setting up which ports get blocked, but you should always be able to add ports to an exceptions list. A software firewall is not the same as a hardware firewall which is discussed in the Networking section. If you have a hardware firewall, you are generally protected well from attacks outside your local network. The reason for the software firewall is so that if one computer in your office gets infected, it can't spread to the others. It acts as a second line of defense. Firewalls act by blocking all the ports on a computer. A port is simply a channel of communication that computers can use, and there are thousands of them available. Since Open Dental uses ports, this can be a problem.

Windows Firewall

On your SERVER: Go to your Control Panel and double click on Security Center.

At the very bottom, double click on Windows Firewall.

A quick solution at this point is to simply turn it off.  If you turn the firewall on later, you will want to then follow the steps below to open up port 3306.

Open Port 3306

Click on the Exceptions tab.

Add a Port.

Fill out as above and click OK.  This opens port 3306 to allow the workstations to contact the MySQL server.