Antivirus solutions for linux? 1

[torandson]

HI,
Can anyone recommend any antivirus solutions that would be effective for a Linux machine connected via a small office network with Windows machines? My concern is both the integrity of the Linux system per se, and also protecting the Windows systems from malware that might sneak into them via the Linux connection. Actually, since all of the machines are multiboot systems, the potential exists for all Linux, all Windows, or any combination of Linux and Windows to be connected at any given time.

Effective is more important than free, but expensive is out of the question.

--torandson

 

[QatQat]

Good day torandson,


a few considerations:

If you are using a linux box as gateway/firewall/proxy, with a good iptables setup, you can protect your windoz boxes on the LAN from most of the new internet malware. Obviously this is not bullet proof solution but it is a good start.

A good iptables setup is very straight forward

- Open what is needed
- Block ALL the rest.


Your mail, however, can bring viruses directly to the windoz PCs, without linux having a chance to filter/block them.

A good way of tackling this is to run your mailserver on linux as well, enabling DNS Blacklists and spamassassin.

If you then want also a good virus vault, (although i must admit that my windoz boxes didn't get any infection in two years and I have not installed any antivirus), CLAM antivirus is a good mailserver scanner and it is free.


Now coming to the dual boot machines: if a machine is running windoz and gets infected, good chances are that your linux installation is NOT be formatted using fat32/VFAT/Fat16. Therefore a windoz infection will not affect your linux installation. in fact windoz does not even see the linux partition/harddrive.

If instead the machine is running linux:
FIrst, there are few recorded viruses targeted at linux.
Second, linux is fundamentally different from windoz and, even if a virus manages to infect your system, the damage will be limited to the user space and will never affect the whole system. This means that your windoz installation will be safe and your linux system, although infected, will not be brought to halt.
To be 100% sure, format your windoz boxes using NTFS and your linux using ext3 (or ext2) and do not mount your windoz partition/harddrive Read/Write. By default, even the newest of linux distro will mount NTFS read-only; this way even a hypotetical linux infection shoudl not reach your windoz filesystem.


Cheers

QatQat






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