[ILUG] Re: anti-virus scanning

[Lars Hecking]

> just in on linuxtoday.com
> 
>  http://noframes.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4882
> 
> virus scanning stuff ...

 Crap. Over-complicated (store and forward; requires cron jobs) and
 non-scalable. It may work well enough for a home environment, but
 that's about it.

| The basic outline of the system consists of using Bash scripts, metamail,
| grep, the Obtuse Systems' smtpd product, Samba and a command-line virus
| scanner.

 Shell scripts give you hideous performance. The old, shell-script version
 of amavis (0.2.x) would drive the load on our mail server up to 40 and beyond
 on mailing list mail.

 metamail is an old, bug-ridden, and basically unmaintained piece of software.
 It doesn't understand multipart/alternative, among others. The recommended
 alternative is usually reformime from the maildrop package.

 Obtuse's smtpd/smtpfwdd is an unmaintained, buggy piece of software. It
 rewrites envelope information and sometimes makes the envelopes unusable,

| I wanted our system to be extremely easy to follow and easy to extend
| without a user having to know C or be a Perl guru. 

 requiring the admin to go in and hack some C.

 A command-line virus scanner, while often the only available option, will
 not let you scale the system. Every invocation of it, for every email sent
 through the system, will reload and reinitialise it's virus database, which
 can be a costly process.

| chown -R uucp.uucp /var/spool/smtpd

 No clue about Unix security. One would definitely use a dedicated user,
 not one that exists for totally different purposes.