openantivirus

[Nick Phillips]

Sorry I've broken the thread; first post got bounced 'cos I forgot to set
the right "From:" address...

On Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 02:33:54PM +1100, Scott Farrell wrote:
> Has anyone looked at integrating any part of the www.openantivirus.org /
> ScannerDaemon , ( see url http://www.openantivirus.org/projects.php).

Not seriously yet; last time I looked at it (not in relation to mailscanner),
it didn't look very worthwhile. Kaffe (which it uses) was also not very stable
at the time, as I understood it.

> Its PatternFinder looks quite interesting, and I could support scanning of
> http/samba/sendmail from maintenance/management of the one virus scanner
> installation (if we/I work on integrating the ScannerDaemon).

I'll be happy to work on it when I hear from someone that they've used it
and it works - well.

> Longer term it would help reduce the work on integrating virus scanners to
> mailscanner,

How?

> It also has the advantage as running as a daemon, rather than starting and
> stopping the virus engine each time.

Several of the currently supported products are available in this form; we
currently choose not to use this feature; all the mails in each batch are
scanned in one run of the scanner, so this is not as major a performance hit
as it might be. There are advantages (related to simplicity) in not using
the daemons. I'm inclined to think that it's worth trying one or some, though.

> I guess the only draw back is Java, whilst a good language etc etc, it
> might be a bit 'heavy' for some users compared to the shell scripts.

Drawbacks: Kaffe, reliability or otherwise of signature updates.


As I said, if I hear from anyone I vaguely trust that it's worth looking
at, I will try it. If I then think that it's worth it, I will add support
for it.

I'm sure that the ability to use a good free free scanner would please a
*lot* of people.


Cheers,


Nick
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp at lemon-computing.com
You know that thing you're about to do? Don't.