On 21-Sep-99 David Wright wrote: > Quoting Keith G. Murphy ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): >> Art Lemasters wrote: >> > BTW, I recently worked a contract for a corporation that uses >> > nothing but NT servers and workstations. The machines were rebooted >> > every two or three days, and complete images were installed to them >> > once a week or more. Granted, though, the employees there were >> > actually >> > allowed to send and receive e-mail to their workstations via the >> > Internet with no UNIX server to protect them! >> > >> Semi-serious question: >> >> How does a UNIX server protect them against viruses (I assume that's >> what you mean)? Do they die in the arid environment of the server? >> ;-) > > I think unix servers are generally virus-neutral. Most of the products > that claim to scan emails, for example, at gateways seem to be built > for NT and Netware. Perhaps this is one reason why so much anti-virus > scanning is left to the end-user, which makes it much more expensive > as well as hit-and-miss. (I for one have no idea how to scan a floppy/ > email/downloaded file with a virus scanner.)
I suggest having a look at AMaViS - A Mail Virus Scanner See: http://satan.oih.rwth-aachen.de/AMaViS/amavis.html This is a (quite complex) script which allows you to apply your favourite ported-to-Linux virus scanner to email (it includes code for extracting attachments which may be uuencoded, base64-encoded, gzipped, tarred, etc, and subjecting each attachment to the scanner). You will also need to download a good virus scanner from a suitable source. I use the McAfee "uvscan"; the docs to AMaViS suggest other choices as well. You can also use this software to scan directories containing Word documents etc, if you keep such stuff. I also set up my mailer (XFMail) so that I can pipe an email to the scanner if it has an attachment which contains MS files (in fact I don't otherwise bother with routine virus scanning of email). Hope this helps, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 21-Sep-99 Time: 16:02:03 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
