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AntiVirus for Novell

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AGA

IS-IT--Management
May 10, 2001
362
AU
Is Novell Netware immune to viruses or we do have to use Antivirus for Novell as well
 
NetWare the operating system is fairly immune to virus's because no-one writes virus's to attack the NetWare System files like they do for Microsoft. However, the files on the server are still just as likely to get a virus than on any other server/workstation platform. No operating system is immume from virus's.

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"It's true, its damn true!"
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Yup, you will want to scan the file systems to prevent your file server from housing infected files. There isn't really any virus that will infect the NetWare OS itself, but the data can be lost or corrupted by an infected PC.
 
Just to add... The biggest risk that I see is that an infected PC could start writing infected files out to the network. Then other users could access those files and become infected themselves. And it could spread fairly quickly. So if you have protection on your server, it will prevent infected files from being written to the server in the first place.

A real world example. a few years ago when I had just started working as the Novell admin for a company, the servers had not been maintained well and the virus def's were in seriously bad shape. Nothing up to date. One admin user got infected with the "I love you" virus because his workstation definitions were out of date or not working. His workstation immediately started scanning the network for shares that could be written to. It went through every folder and subfolder it could find and in the end wrote over 150,000 infected files to one of the main Novell servers. It was especially bad because at the time he had full access to the entire system. (not for long though).

Note that this was nothing compared to the damage that was caused to the Microsoft servers, but for someone not used to dealing with viruses, it was quite an exercise. The nice thing about the I Love You virus is that it didn't actually infect real files so it was fairly easy to clean up.



Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting
 
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