Security

[MattS]

At the moment I have ESET installed on my windows and no security on Linux. Does anyone know of any free security for Linux or Windows that:
A) Automatic virus updates
B) Antivirus, and
C) Checks each file you open and is constantly running

[xander69]

Hi,

I've found AVGfree from Grisoft is ideal (for Windows)
I've no antivirus on my Linux but AVG also do a Linux version, there's also ClamAV
(free.avg.com and clamav.net). No doubt there's lots more out there, especially for windows but those should do the job,
Slàinte mhor,
Jamie

[bigtomrodney]

You don't really need antivirus on Linux the way you do on Windows. Sometimes people use it as a courtesy to other Windows users or if you are running an email server. I'll put it to you this way, all of the viruses you've seen on Windows won't work on Linux and there are no real-world viruses in the wild for Linux as of yet.

It's a good idea to check now and again for rootkits, these however are usually targetted attacks. Still it doesn't hurt to check....

Rootkit.nl - Protect your machine

Just make sure to run your firewall or at least have no listening services running. That should be enough to keep you safe. Also you might have a read of this article.

[r_avital]

MattS,

You probably should look at clamav, the virus protection server for Linux. I don't know which Linux distribution you are using, but it's included in the major ones at least, though not necessarily installed by default. So look for it in your package-management system, along with command-line utilities and/or GUI front-ends that will also perform automatic virus database updates, scheduled scans, etc. This should take care of your requirements A and B. As far as C, it's a service, so it's constantly running, but I'm not sure it checks every file you open - the documentation is good, so you should be able to find at least one way to get that accomplished. I know for a fact that you can use it to scan emails, because I'm using that capability. There is also a good Wiki for it, but since I'm a newbie on this forum, I'm not allowed to post the link (Google on clamav wiki).

Hope this helps, and good luck!

[MattS]

Dad says I have to run an antivirus that fits this criteria if I want to connect with his network (BTW, every computer we have, including mine, runs windows. Mine is the only one which runs Linux).

[D-cat]

Install and set up clamfs (available in Synaptic)... also grab clamav, clamav-daemon, and a few other dependencies should come with it.

I'll go try and figure out how to make this all work. When said and done, it should satisfy your father's requirements on the Linux side.

Edit2: The clamfs is not working as transparently as I'd hoped. While I can get it to take over /home, suddenly gdm can't log me in... even a regular text login gives me a .profile: operation not permitted error.

I don't want to go dazuko if I can avoid it (slow)... I'll check more options...

[D-cat]

I slept through the FAIL boat cruise.

I have had very limited success using clamfs to take over the user home directory. I passed out with a headache trying to make this work, but it's just too restrictive with errors galore, a baren X interface (gdm couldn't work)... coupled with the Xorg's no longer using the olde-time shortcut keys left me with a useless screen I couldn't even log out of (at least Crtl + Alt + F1 still worked).

The limited success was that it did block an attempted read of the Eicar.com test file with a matching log entry, but to the user the read was blocked simply and silently as "Operation not Permitted."

clamfs: (cat:8321) (tester:1001) /home/tester/Downloads/eicar.com: Eicar-Test-Signature FOUND

The problem I'm having using clamfs with X is lots of file read or write failures for which the logs are so helpful as:

Dec 18 15:07:12 vbox4 clamfs: (/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2:7312) (tester:1001) /homebase/tester/.gconf/apps/nm-applet/%gconf.xml: lstat() failed: Permission denied. ERROR
Dec 18 15:07:12 vbox4 clamfs: (/usr/bin/VBoxClient:7492) (tester:1001) /homebase/tester/.vboxclient-seamless.pid: Access denied. ERROR

I've tried toggling the public flag and adjusting directory locations and even messed with permissions a bit, but none of it is working. The best I can tell is clamfs is getting calls it doesn't know how to deal with, so it denies them by default.

This could still work if specifically targeted to certain directories only (like Downlods or cache), but on-access scanning of a whole home partition/directory with clamfs is a bust.

This sucks because virtually every other disk based on-access virus scan solution for Linux relies on the dazuko module, which I can't find available for Karmic, and that's one module I don't feel like messing with from source. There's on-access solutions for protecting the network (samba, ftp, http proxys) with clam available from the repository, just not the local disks.

Does anyone else have an idea that will meet this this kid's requirements per dad?

[MattS]

I'll switch to ESET if I have to like I have on windows but I was hoping there'd be some free antivirus which did that (I would change windows antivirus but dad has a spare copy of ESET from our old PC).

[D-cat]

Well, you can change your distro. I know OpenSuse has available Avira antivir (and the required dazuko) packages from the repos. This would satisfy your requirements.

[MattS]

No thanks. I've got everything working on ubuntu and i'd prefer to pay for security than have to switch distro. It takes ages to set up everything and I love the Ubuntu interface, anyway. But are these "Avira antivir (and the required dazuko) packages" available on windows and why aren't they available on ubuntu, out of curiosity.