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Glide path...
I'm in the store for the last hour of the day, on the theory that a change of pace is good, especially for someone who's going to be working single-mindedly all weekend on toxicology.
When I ran the virus scanner on my desktop the other day, I became acutely aware that the software hadn't actually run in months (for whatever reason, but the last scan took place in early 2004). And I don't think any of the machines behind my router run their own firewalls (except the Linux machines, which run the default rule set for ipchains). This raises an interesting question: Have I just been incredibly lucky, or have I allowed some kind of "safe computing" environment to evolve in my office?
I think it's probably a combination. Part of it, certainly, is the fact that I have a "passive" defense in depth, starting with whatever measures are taken by the people I typically deal with, reinforced by my email provider, Fastmail.fm, which scans incoming mail and attachments for viruses, etc. I also have the luxury of moving any suspicious files that do get through to a Linux box for further analysis (though I do not always make use of such capability, as will be seen below).
So in the end, I must ask myself the question: is it worth while investing money to subscribe to one of the comprehensive commercial virus/firewall/whatever packages for my desktop, or is there something out there - preferably open source - that will do a workmanlike job of virus checking at the level I perceive I need?
A Google search turned up ClamWin, which by all indications has the horsepower to do the job. Indeed, about 20 minutes of work with the app showed that it's a very straightforward, no-frills application that not only runs well, but can be run from a thumb drive, which gives me ideas for offering virus-scanning as a service at the store. (In fact, earlier, I ran the app from a JumpDrive on one of the store machines, and uncovered one infected file in a driver subdirectory.)
Scanning gagarin showed up two infected files, both of which I knew about (one was a Linux virus file, which I was going to get around to examining, someday; the other was something I strongly suspected was a virus based on its provenance, i.e., an attachment from an unknown correspondent, but which might actually be a useful file if the correspondent turned out to be legitimate; I guess now I know).
So, for the time being, I think I'll see how things go using ClamWin as the virus checker on my desktop.
Cheers...
When I ran the virus scanner on my desktop the other day, I became acutely aware that the software hadn't actually run in months (for whatever reason, but the last scan took place in early 2004). And I don't think any of the machines behind my router run their own firewalls (except the Linux machines, which run the default rule set for ipchains). This raises an interesting question: Have I just been incredibly lucky, or have I allowed some kind of "safe computing" environment to evolve in my office?
I think it's probably a combination. Part of it, certainly, is the fact that I have a "passive" defense in depth, starting with whatever measures are taken by the people I typically deal with, reinforced by my email provider, Fastmail.fm, which scans incoming mail and attachments for viruses, etc. I also have the luxury of moving any suspicious files that do get through to a Linux box for further analysis (though I do not always make use of such capability, as will be seen below).
So in the end, I must ask myself the question: is it worth while investing money to subscribe to one of the comprehensive commercial virus/firewall/whatever packages for my desktop, or is there something out there - preferably open source - that will do a workmanlike job of virus checking at the level I perceive I need?
A Google search turned up ClamWin, which by all indications has the horsepower to do the job. Indeed, about 20 minutes of work with the app showed that it's a very straightforward, no-frills application that not only runs well, but can be run from a thumb drive, which gives me ideas for offering virus-scanning as a service at the store. (In fact, earlier, I ran the app from a JumpDrive on one of the store machines, and uncovered one infected file in a driver subdirectory.)
Scanning gagarin showed up two infected files, both of which I knew about (one was a Linux virus file, which I was going to get around to examining, someday; the other was something I strongly suspected was a virus based on its provenance, i.e., an attachment from an unknown correspondent, but which might actually be a useful file if the correspondent turned out to be legitimate; I guess now I know).
So, for the time being, I think I'll see how things go using ClamWin as the virus checker on my desktop.
Cheers...