Re: [SLUG] virus protection for the Linux environment?

From: Derek Glidden (dglidden@illusionary.com)
Date: Mon Nov 12 2001 - 16:20:37 EST


Tina Gasperson wrote:
>
> I'm thinking this is mostly an attempt to market to
> companies using Linux servers, whose purchasing agents
> don't know any better--although I wondered about the
> "backdoor" protection, which isn't virus protection at
> all. Does anybody have any opinions on the usefulness
> of "ServerProtect?"

It's useless if you're running Linux on your desktop, because there
effectively aren't any Linux "viruses." (Blah blah "trojans" blah blah
"worms" - I'll argue all that some other time.)

But if you are a company who is using Linux as your file server for a
large network of Windows workstations, it could still be valuable. The
way I read that description is that this is the environment it's
specifically designed for.

If your users are storing virus-infected files on your server, and your
server is Linux, which is immune itself, you'd still like to see if
those files harbor viruses before another one of your Windows users
opens it. So you would install a virus scanner on your file server to
find those files that are infected before they can spread around your
desktop network.

It actually makes a lot of sense and is a really nice selling point for
using a Linux box as your enterprise file server - it won't get viruses
itself, so it's much safer than using, say, Windows NT or 2000, which
may succumb itself to a virus, at which point you now have to worry
about your _server_ infecting your desktop machines - something ALL your
users are talking to - not just other desktop machines, which will only
try to talk to each other once they get infected.

Of course, it makes even more sense to use Linux as your desktop OS
also, which makes your whole network immune to viruses. :)

-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
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"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
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print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval 

usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \ | extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -

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