Sorry, I forgot to specify that we are using a Windows network.
Anyway, I found the culprit that has been flooding my network and basically brought verything to a grinding halt.
It is a little program called
AvAgent.exeAn internet search told me that it belongs to Avast!
We reformated one of our Windows server back in May (3 months ago) and have not rebooted most machines since then. Our technician "forgot" to re-install the Avast! Management. After some maintenance on another server on Thursday night, we had everyone reboot on Friday morning. That's when all hell broke loose. Only a few of the 100+ machines on our network were configured with the Management. Most were installed using the regular install.
The ADNM documentation claims that the client will try to connect to installation server, and if not found will send a broadcast and wait for an answer... Well I beg to differ, my syslogs shows client machines broadcasting floods of "where are you"... I'v seen tons of these and my network statiscics showed over a 1.3 million packets PER HOUR of traffic on a network that is normally slightly busy but was unusabled at that time.
On another note, I tried installing the ADNM (setup_adnm.exe) and it only copies some of the files and aborts with not windows ever poping up and no error. Tryied the cleaner and re-install to no avail. Tried a different server - same bad result. No executable gets installed, but the directory structure is created in c:\program files\Avast4...
This was tried on two (2) different Windows 2003 Server. Both are patch current. Documentation talks about setup_av_mgm but I never found that anywhere.
Help please !