On Sun Nov 28 7:35 , 'Rony Bill' ronbilly@hotpop.com sent:
An antivirus detects viruses after they enter the system and get resident. Many of my clients are home users so the comp is used by the kids too and they have their own choices and uses which are difficult to implement in linux. They are used to the standard programs.
That's not quite correct. The two most popular AV solutions, Norton & McAfee, both check files as soon as they are accessed. A file being downloaded from the network is scanned before being saved onto the disk. Executables are also scanned before they are run. I'll give you an example.... some years ago, I installed WinMe & NAV2002 on a friends PC. I updated the AV using the live update feature of NAV. Several days later during an online chat with him over ICQ, as a prank I sent him Sub7 trojan client, under the garb of it being a game. The download completed and the file then promply disappeared. It ended up in the quarantine folder of NAV instead of the specified folder.
Vivek
----- Original Message ----- From: "Vivek J.Patankar" vivekpatankar@spymac.com
That's not quite correct. The two most popular AV solutions, Norton & McAfee, both check files as soon as they are accessed. A file being downloaded from the network is scanned before being saved onto the disk. Executables are also scanned before they are run.
My experience with Norton is not very fantastic. My friend's customer had a LAN with 3 comps and one was on cable net as well as connected to the other 2 using 2 LAN cards. Practically every few days my friend's engineers would format the system and reload with all av uptodate, but still the viruses would strike. Finally I went to have a look. I personally saw viruses appearing within a few hours of reloading. Even after being at the office till midnight making the system up again, the next day we got a call that viruses were back. What also happens is that in the background as the av scans infected disks, it also slows down the system to almost look like a hang. Finally the client was advised to go back to dialup and now things are under control.
Migrating a customer to linux is not so easy even if the driver issues are resolved, as all his old data has to be converted to the linux format which his new non-microsoft programs in linux should read and edit just as before. Many use Tally or QFA or similar custom accounting software and this data will go waste in linux without the program being able to run. Outlook Express has one unique feature where you can have multiple accounts with their own individual smtp settings. If there is a suspicious mail you can right click on the header and view its entire source code without opening it. I have downloaded and tried out different email clients but OE was most feature rich.
There is a project going on at the osa foundation which is coming out by next year with a free opensource version of Outlook called Chandler. www.osafoundation.org
Regards,
Rony.
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Rony Bill -
Vivek J.Patankar