include much needed antivirus products in FC2

[Steven Pritchard]

Pardon me in advance for contributing to this endless thread.

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 07:33:24PM -0600, Steve Bergman wrote:
> Not all of the points have been made.  For example, not once during the
> thread did anyone address the question of whether the *users*, as
> opposed to *developers*, of Fedora would want AV included.  

I'm pretty sure I addressed that point, or at least tried to.  As a
user, you really want a package like clamav (or spamassassin, for that
matter) to be as up-to-date as possible.  Assuming updates for Core
packages are handled the same way updates for RHL has always been
handled, new versions of packages are only introduced when there's a
clear need, such as a security patch that either can't be backported
or isn't worth the effort (because the new version is *only* that
security fix).

I'm going on the assumption that Extras will be more fluid, updated
whenever it makes sense.  Maybe I'm wrong.

> And by the way, as a user, I *would* like to have AV available to me in
> FC2 for my mail servers.

You can have it now, at least to some degree.  There's a clamav
package in the fedora.us repository.  So far there's no
amavis/mailscanner/whatever-you-might-like, but that's just a matter
of the right person finding time to work on it.

So assuming there's an official Extras tree, or FC2 includes the
appropriate configuration to pull from fedora.us out of the box, you
should be able to get everything working on your shiny new FC2 mail
server with "apt-get install amavisd-new" or whatever.

Oh, and somebody else said something about spam being a universal
problem, but AV isn't.  Well, I disagree.  Some (maybe most) days I
get more virus spam than enlarge-various-body-parts spam, so filtering
that crap out is important.  Fortunately, just blocking all
attachments that a certain inferior (but pervasive) OS considers
"executable" kills 98.6% of the "infected" mail (according to the last
month's logs from the box I mentioned earlier).

(Oh, and it is just disturbing how easy it is to do this with postfix.
That and built-in maildir support are what finally made me give up and
switch from sendmail.  Email me off-list if you want details and are
too lazy to google.  ;)

Steve
-- 
Steven Pritchard - K&S Pritchard Enterprises, Inc.
Email: steve at kspei.com             http://www.kspei.com/
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