Commercial virus checker failed ...

Nick Phillips nwp at LEMON-COMPUTING.COM
Wed Jan 9 12:15:26 GMT 2002


On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 07:04:59AM -0500, Christopher Hicks wrote:

> > Has anyone got any better ideas for the keywords than my suggestion
> > above? (Nick doesn't like it...)
>
> Making those keywords into lists seemed pretty logical to me.  What is the
> objection?

That you have two separate lists which must be kept in the same order.
The consequences of getting it wrong might be that each scanner's output
gets parsed by a parser intended for the other, and as a result, both
fail to recognise the infection reports, and pass a message as OK.

Which would be Bad.

Although I haven't checked through to see whether this could actually happen
at the moment, it's a possibility at some stage.

Even if the worst-case scenario doesn't happen, it would lead to very confusing
bug reports/requests for help - "I'm getting a message that says that the F-Prot
parser has failed and might have a bug"...

> I'd been wondering anyway, is the plan for it to run all of them
> regardless?  Stop after one finds a virus?  What?

I haven't looked at what Jules has done yet, but I'd guess that it'd just
carry on and add all the reports that it gets one after another.

And to disinfect, just run each in the order that they're specified.



Cheers,


Nick

--
Nick Phillips -- nwp at lemon-computing.com
You will soon forget this.



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