McAfee autoupdate & wrapper

[Rabellino Sergio]

Tony Finch wrote:
> Rabellino Sergio <rabellino at DI.UNITO.IT> wrote:
>
>>today I've got my hands on these scripts, 'cause something was wrong in
>>my installation, so these was fully rewritten to get them more reliable,
>>if the download fails and to support the extra dat features, and a proxy
>>if needed.
>
>
> 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.
>
but your connection could not be as reliable as the NAI web site.... so I've thinked about the retry feature.
> 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.
this was intentional,  because a wget error (es http/404 file not found) break the script. If you know how to do this
with the -e , let me know.
> Instead you've added some ad-hoc error handling such as the pointless
> wget checking, but missed out checks for directory creation etc.
>
Other checks could be easily done, I'll try to code them.

> (2) You've broken backwards compatibility by removing the -f (force)
> option.
>
The "force" option is not useful anymore, because if the release X is running, then it's ok (mcafee --version check
succesful), in other case, I must remove all
and force the download of the new release not installed. The old script lack this, so if a download is interrupted, then
the dir X under datafiles exist and only a "force" could
get the things right. But then: or I use the "force" option every time, or a download break, get my uvscan not updated
for this release. (I was clear ???)

> (3) The directory layout changes are gratuitous, and are not suitable
> for general use because of the lack of support from the install script.
>
Yes, I understand, it's my braindamage that wants all under a $PREFIX, and then a bin/doc/dat directory ....

> (4) You haven't added command-line options for the new proxy and retry
> features.
It's so useful ?
>
> (5) The extra.dat support is not necessary.
>
why ? In some cases between two dat release I've used the extra.dat to catch some viruses. (W32/Myparty - BackDoor-AAF
> (6) The code formatting is a disaster.
>
strange .... i'm using spaces, not tabs.
> 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.
> --
----
Randal wrote:
> 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,
Why download the TAR (4Mb) if I know that my dats are not older than those contained in it ?


After this round of question/response I'll do the work believed useful, so tell me !


Thanks.
--
Dott. Sergio Rabellino

  Technical Staff
  Department of Computer Science
  University of Torino (Italy)

http://www.di.unito.it/~rabser
Tel. +39-0116706701
Fax. +39-011751603