On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, Christopher X. Candreva wrote: > This thread on Trojan.JS.RunMe had me thinking: Hourly virus updates is > better than any of the commercial virus scanners, but obviously still has > issues, especially since a bunch of us obviously submitted updates that had > already been entered. I gather from these posts that the virusdb's actually > have some form of version number. > > Suppose there was a DNS entry, say virusdb.clamav.net (or > version.virusdb.clamav.net, etc), that returned simply a text record with > the current DB version in it. Then, it would be possible to check the > version with a relatively cheap single UDP packet, rather than a full http > check, and people could check for DB updates more often than once an hour > without taxing the distribution system.
That's a very interesting idea, but I can imagine a few problems: - we'd have to have a very short time-to-live or it would get stale - the dns might know about the update before the mirrors all get it - if everyone finds out about an update within 5 minutes of each other, the mirrors might not handle the load After seeing a Defcon talk on putting arbitrary data in DNS, though, I wonder if we could put the daily updates (gpg signed) into DNS? That would take a lot of load off the mirrors (occasional checks for main.cvd updates are all that is required). And caching DNS servers would distribute the load a bit. Anyway, just another crazy idea for the developers to consider. Damian Menscher -- -=#| Physics Grad Student & SysAdmin @ U Illinois Urbana-Champaign |#=- -=#| 488 LLP, 1110 W. Green St, Urbana, IL 61801 Ofc:(217)333-0038 |#=- -=#| 4602 Beckman, VMIL/MS, Imaging Technology Group:(217)244-3074 |#=- -=#| <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www.uiuc.edu/~menscher/ Fax:(217)333-9819 |#=- -=#| The above opinions are not necessarily those of my employers. |#=- ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by Shop4tech.com-Lowest price on Blank Media 100pk Sonic DVD-R 4x for only $29 -100pk Sonic DVD+R for only $33 Save 50% off Retail on Ink & Toner - Free Shipping and Free Gift. http://www.shop4tech.com/z/Inkjet_Cartridges/9_108_r285 _______________________________________________ Clamav-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/clamav-users
