include much needed antivirus products in FC2

Adam Debus rhl at reachone.com
Mon Jan 5 18:41:11 UTC 2004


>
> Try this sometime - process 100000+ pieces of mail a day and see if AV
> scanning doesn't add much load? AV scanning centrally does NOT scale.
>
> Moreover - if you are always protecting your users then they will never
> learn.
>

    Yeah, we tried that, in the end we discovered that it cost us much less
to add another box to the mail cluster and scan the half a million mail
messages a day instead of dealing with the support costs every time the
latest mail worm came out, and everyone still hadn't patched their outlook
express from the last worm. (which we ended up oursourcing, but that was for
political reasons).

    In my experience, unless you have 100% control over the user computer,
where the user has no permissions to do anything other then run word and
other selected applications, they will find a way to break, mangle, infect,
and/or completely destroy the install they are working on at some point or
another, no matter how many times you tell them that they can't/shouldn't do
something. That's both from my time working on a college campus and here at
my current position.

    I think it's great that you work at a place where that isn't the case,
and perhaps my experiences all come from the fact that I've always worked on
"open" networks.

    All that being said, I don't think that it should be installed by
default, I think it should be left up to the user. But I do think that it
certianly fits within the realms of the current way of designing the distro
so that the distro can fill multiple roles easily.

Thanks,

Adam Debus





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