Quoting Bowie Bailey <bowie_bai...@buc.com>:
A suggestion for the future... Rather than disabling clamd with the EOL signature, have freshclam key on the signature (or something else about the file) and fail the update with a notice that the current version is no longer supported.
This won't work unless we can predict all future needs... How could they have predicted the kill-signature 5 years ago, to include in the old code? Current freshclam warns about it being out of date, but people ignore it. So failing the freshclam will be ignored also. Now people think they are protected but they are not. How is that better?
This way the server will continue to run with the old signatures, but there will be a notice in the logs that there is a problem.
You assume they will check the log... And if they do, that they will take some action. Both are bad assumptions.
More generally, maybe there should be a capability in freshclam for messages to be sent from the developers. Freshclam could look for a message whenever it does an update and if it sees one, it could print it in the logs. This would give an easy way to notify users of upcoming changes or other important issues.
Interesting idea... But it only works if you can get everyone to upgrade to the new version that supports this. How do you do that? As we've seen, by killing their old versions... So the killing still can't be avoided... But I do like the idea. It may not be feasible, but it is an interesting idea... And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, will everyone really read the logs? I'm pretty sure many will ignore it...
(Yes, I do realize that this would not help the old versions that are out there now, but if it is implemented in the next update, then it could be used when EOL for 0.96.1 rolls around.)
Exactly... Thanks for proposing a solution! -- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin Go Longhorns! _______________________________________________ Help us build a comprehensive ClamAV guide: visit http://wiki.clamav.net http://www.clamav.net/support/ml
