MailScanner doesn't deal with lousy internet

[Alisdair Davey]

You could do but I don't think this is a wise move. It used to be that I
never saw half the virii on the net and could update once a day and not
worry. Now I think updating your virus scanner any less than once an
hour is not a good idea. I've had one virus that I saw before the virus
scanner update was available (I use Sophos) but thanks to MailScanner it
was blocked. I have have virii arrive now 23 and 37 minutes after the
virus scanner was updated. My first sobig-f being 37 minutes after I got
a Sophos update for it. A little shell programming will enable you to
check for old update scripts. Better to do that and check for updates
every hour than lowering the update schedule to nightly.
Cheers
Alisdair

On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 21:50, Mike Kercher wrote:
> You could move the update_virus_scanners script from /etc/cron.hourly to
> /etc/cron.daily
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf
> Of Chris Mason
> Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 9:55 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: MailScanner doesn't deal with lousy internet
>
>
> One of my servers is on a DSL from Cable & Wireless and they are having
> problems with the gateway. We are seeing periods of packet loss and outages
> as they try to fix it, and it's been going on for a couple of days now. The
> server is running Redhat 7.3 and MailScanner with SA and ClamAV/F-Prot. I
> found today that mail had not been delivered for hours so I checked the
> server and found that the scripts that updated the virus databases had
> locked up. Restarting MailScanner did not fix it and only killing the
> offending PIDs solved it. Is there a way to improve this situation? I would
> like to lower the update schedule to nightly so as to lessen the chance of
> this happening. Is there a way to kill off any update scripts with the old
> MailScanner process?
>
> Chris Mason
--
Dr Alisdair Davey                                 ard at pergamentum.com
Pergamentum Solutions                             Tel: 1-303-554-9190
2066 Dailey Ln
Superior, CO 80027