Yo compacters everywhere, Our Jason White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> askz:
<<With all this talk about this Bugbear virus lately (mostly on the other lists I subscribe to), I was wondering, Is there a virus protection program that will run on my SE/30?>> You bet there is. After putting several pallets of compact Macs of all flavors back into service, I've learned a bit about virii checkers of the era. And of that era is the era of our compact Macs. Anyway. Most of my Macs have come from school or corporate service usually containing a virii checker of one kind or another. Most all of them were sadly out of date when compared with the latest dates of documents still on the hard drives of these Macs. Until I got into the habit of checking for virii FIRST, I was smacked down hard a number of times. Well, as I could find 'em, I started out checking various virri checkers to see which worked. Until this time, I had been a faithful user of the very last Disinfectant 3.7.1. And still I was smacked down hard a couple of times. By hard, I mean an ancient virus on an ancient compact wouldn't be caught by my external startup drive with Disinfectant installed and fully going. Even running Disinfectant as a first act didn't see it or help me. By the time I worked over the compact doing diagnostics and scavanging softwares, my drive was crapped up and I hadn't a clue. Then the next Mac would get crapped up from my external drive; and the next; and the next... I went through three such sieges of something Disinfectant wasn't seeing. The typical siege here would have maybe 45 - 50 items infected over a string of three compacts before I figured out I'd been hit again. At this time, I was running Virex 5.8.1 on my main Mac PowerBook 2400. I SCSI'd my compact external drive up to my 2400 which immediately told me I had some damned thing called MDEF C or D. This latter day Virex on my 2400 did its thing and cleaned up my external drive ending each of these three seiges. But no Virex 5.8.1 was going to run on a compact startup disk. I trialed a number of Symanntec virii checkers of the version 4x era not catching my by now "MDEF Demo Mac". Yeah, I actually used this one infected SE to demo what a real virus alert looked like and why to shop around for a virii checker - they are not all the same. And, sorry -p, Disinfectant 3.7.1 WILL NOT see this virus either. Then, like all things Mac eventually seem to do, a factory new still sealed floppy of Virex version 3.83 came into my hands. No, I wasn't looking for it. It simply came to me in a box with some other assorted Mac stuff. I ran this Virex 3.83 on my MDEF Demo Mac. Yup, it immediately saw the MDEF. Then with a click, cleaned it up. Not to worry for loss of my MDEF Demo Mac. In another week, another Mac from that pallet had the same MDEF. And this new Virex 3.83 tool caught it on startup. This tool has been my first line virii checker on all 680x0 Macs ever since. I now have a couple of infected hard drives found by this Virex 3.83 which neither Disinfectant nor any Symanntec virii checker working from a 68000 boot drive will see. That first Virex 3.83 floppy that came to me is an 800k boot floppy running some version of System 6. Virex then was a DataWatch product. Used as is, it works on most of our compacts. Transferring the Virex parts to larger floppies and external boot drives, it does its thing paired with any flavor of System 7 for use with our later compacts and all other 680x0 Macs. I've used it on a PPC Mac but it contains only 680x0 era virus definitions so this is not a good thing to do. My now replaced Virex 5.8.1, Gamba's recommended Virex 5.9, and Jason's discovered Virex 6.1 will run on an SE/30 but they are huge and slow compared to my Virex 3.83. And that is because they are PPC capable. They do not run on our 68000 compacts at all. It's virii index lists all of 680x0 era virii that Disinfectant does so covers all that a compact could care about. When now I hit a virus with the help of my Virex 3.83, I run it again using both Disinfectant and Symanntec. They usually find it too except for this one, probably latter day strain of the MDEF virus. Then I look on the suspect drive for both a virii checker and at the dates of the last documents created. There sits either Disinfectant or a Symanntec virii checker. Was it used? Did it have current Virus definitions? Three compacts on one pallet from the same school were brought down in the same week ten years ago by this same MDEF virus. Perfectly good compacts taken out of service years before their time due to a virus their virii checker couldn't or didn't see. They couldn't see it so couldn't fix it. There may be other versions of Virex from that era that will work just as well. Maybe even some Symanntec virii checker does too. As of this moment, none of them have come to me free in a box of Mac stuff. And the teenage lad from Utica, New York who wrote the MDEF virus; Where is he now? Probably a fellow in his early thirties, coupla kids, trying to make a mortgage working in some digital industry position making the big bucks while I am still sweating over his youthful sillyness trying to polish up an old SE to sell or use to teach Mac to our seniors. My Virex 3.83 has a very long life ahead of it. Bill -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. 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