[ILUG] Re: anti-virus scanning

[Declan Grady]

Wow. Thanks Lars, I had saved that webpage for later, but now I reckon its
for the bin.

Cheers,
Declan
[NODIS]


----- Original Message -----
From: "Lars Hecking"
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 5:44 PM
Subject: [ILUG] Re: anti-virus scanning


>
>  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.