Sophos v4 problems

Paul Welsh paul.welsh.3 at googlemail.com
Wed Jan 21 14:13:20 GMT 2009


We have a Sophos site licence so I had the choice of downoading Sophos
6 or Sophos 4.37 from their web site.  The MailScanner documentation
mentions v5 but there's no sign of it on the Sophos site.

Thinking that Sophos 6 had the on-access scanning and central
management which I didn't need, I went for the next latest version of
4.37 which was 100 MB smaller.

Unfortunately, version 4.37 installed in /usr/local/Sophos even with
the /usr/sbin/Sophos.install script.  Even when I changed
/etc/MailScanner/virus.scanners.conf my /var/log/maillog showed:
Sophos-autoupdate[24052]: Could not calculate Sophos version number

I tried re-installing using the Sophos install script and specifying
the directory:
install.sh -d /opt/sophos-av
but still got the same errors.

In the end I downloaded v6 of Sophos and ran /usr/sbin/Sophos.install.
 It installed in /opt/sophos-av.  All is now working fine.

Interestingly, maillog now shows:
Sophos-autoupdate[2789]: Sophos V5 updated

So, if you are considering using Sophos my advice is to put up with
the large download and long installation time and go with v6.

Don't know if it's a small bug that the autoupdate script thinks v6 is
v5 but there you go.


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