McAfee autoupdate & wrapper

Randal, Phil prandal at HEREFORDSHIRE.GOV.UK
Wed Mar 24 14:23:35 GMT 2004


> I've had a quick look at your new scripts. I like the idea of getting
> uvscan's idea of the current dat version rather than believing the
> filesystem, and the proxy support is useful. I'm less convinced by the
> retry support, since IME NAI's web site is not unreliable and the cron
> job will run again soon anyway.
>
> There are some problems:
>
> (1) You've broken the error handling by removing -e from the #!/bin/sh
> line, which prevented the script from stumbling on blindly
> after an error.
> Instead you've added some ad-hoc error handling such as the pointless
> wget checking, but missed out checks for directory creation etc.
>
> (2) You've broken backwards compatibility by removing the -f (force)
> option.
>
> (3) The directory layout changes are gratuitous, and are not suitable
> for general use because of the lack of support from the
> install script.
>
> (4) You haven't added command-line options for the new proxy and retry
> features.
>
> (5) The extra.dat support is not necessary.
>
> (6) The code formatting is a disaster.
>
> If you can address these problems and provide a clean patch against
> the current mcafee-autoupdate script I'll have a look at merging them.
>
> Tony.
> --
> f.a.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/
> SHANNON: NORTHERLY 4 OR 5, OCCASIONALLY 6 LATER. OCCASIONAL RAIN. GOOD
> BECOMING MODERATE.

One option which might be worth pursuing is abandoning the use of the
"released" DAT files and just downloading the DAILY dat files once every few
hours.

http://download.nai.com/products/mcafee-avert/daily_dats/DAILYDAT.TAR

NAI are totally reluctant to produce an incremental extra.dat file, alas
(yes, I've raised the issue with them).

Cheers,

Phil

---------------------------------------------
Phil Randal
Network Engineer
Herefordshire Council
Hereford, UK



More information about the MailScanner mailing list