On Sat, 4 Oct 2008, Dennis Peterson wrote: > Hopefully they're not running mail servers on the Internet elsewise they > could easily be considered derelict in their responsibilities.
Ah. Yes, I must be 'derelict' because there is only ONE sysadmin (me) and I go home on weekends? Heck, I'm not even the 'worst case' you should worry about. I check for failures over the weekend. But there are many home-grown servers out there, particularly in small offices, that are completely unattended over weekends. They are run by very good, intelligent, but NON-technical people who bring in a tech guy to set it all up for them, and then have that tech guy check up on the system "occasionally". If they have an obvious problem, they call their tech guy to "come in". But there is never anything 'obvious' about ClamAV aborting. That's the argument here. They could go for *weeks* not knowing their ClamAV has failed silently. In my opinion, the only 'derelict' action is to advocate standards that *ignore* that these systems/users exist, on the feeble argument that they "should not" do it that way. The case cited above is becoming more and more common in the business world. It's the reason that we get 'bots' all over the place sending spam. Poorly configured and unprotected. Some probably don't even use any AV at all, simply out of ignorance. But if they make the *effort* to use an AV product shouldn't we give them the best chance of it working? All it takes is some *warning* that changes have occurred since they installed the software? HEY CLAMAV DEVELOPERS! Another strong suggestion: Place the RELEASE number as a 'config item' at the top of all distributed config files. Then any time the software is updated, and spots that it is running with an older config, it can e-mail the owner/admin and inform them that new options are available, and to double-check the old ones. Oh, and perhaps an option that says "USE DEFAULT CONFIG" that would remain constant throughout any/all releases, so that those people who install ClamAV as a 'package' will always "work" on some basic level? Anyways.... - Charles _______________________________________________ Help us build a comprehensive ClamAV guide: visit http://wiki.clamav.net http://www.clamav.net/support/ml
