McAfee autoupdate & wrapper

[Remco Barendse]

I have been using the daily dats for a very long time now.

The downside is that you may get an occasional false alarm, I never
experienced that it failed to catch a virus.

The upside is that you are almost realtime update if you fetch the daily
dats twice a day :) Even the new ones are caught, mcafee is just too slow
with the regular dats.



On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Randal, Phil wrote:

> > 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
>