virus scan not available -> no virus check!

[Jules Field]

On 29/11/2009 12:38, mog wrote:
>
>
> Frank Cusack wrote:
>> On November 28, 2009 1:56:21 PM +0000 Jules Field 
>> <MailScanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> Frank,
>>>
>>> I quite understand your point, and will see what I can do to address 
>>> it.
>>> It's only really a problem with clamd and the other "daemon-based" 
>>> virus
>>> scanners. I can't promise anything, but I will take a look.
>>>
>>> What exactly would you like MailScanner to do in such a situation?
>>>
>>> And, believe it or not, I can't remember anyone ever bringing this up
>>> before as a major point. Basically you currently have to be sure your
>>> daemons are running properly for it to work correctly.
>>>
>>> If the daemon cannot be contacted, what would you prefer?
>>> a) mail stops flowing
>>> b) mail is all quarantined
>>> c) something else
>>>
>>> (a) is possibly preferred, I don't think (b) is a good idea. It 
>>> needs to
>>> be some fairly simple action, I don't want to have to write reams of 
>>> code
>>> for this unlikely event.
>>
>> (a) would be my preference.  An alert wouldn't even need to be sent --
>> when mail stops it will be noticed rather quickly.  And as someone else
>> pointed out, an email alert may not make it anyway (it probably gets
>> routed through MailScanner).
>>
>> There's also the question of whether mail should stop if ANY of the 
>> virus
>> scanners are unavailable or only if ALL scanners are unavailable.  I
>> don't have a suggestion for that.  If you have only 1 virus scanner
>> than both conditions are met so it's obvious what to do there.
>>
>> -frank
>
> Agreed. (a) seems to make the most sense and hopefully isn't too 
> difficult to implement. I think quarantining all the mail would be 
> really annoying.
>
> I believe that if people are running more than one virus scanner and 
> one stops working, MailScanner should not treat this as a critical 
> error and stop processing mail. To me, having more than one virus 
> scanner is just like having redundancy of some kind. One failing 
> doesn't mean all operations should stop, since messages are still 
> being scanned for viruses, just not as well as they might be normally.
This is all implemented in the latest beta I have just released, 4.79.4.

Please test it out for me and check that it does work.

Jules

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