Re: [seul-edu] High School Educational Programs

[Chris Hornbaker <chrishornbaker@earthlink.net>]

> Most of those were email scanners - are there any resident scanners like
> Windows has? Or is that sort of thing not needed in the Linux world? On our
> 2k network, students bring in files from home, and the disks need to be
> scanned before documents can be allowed on the network (in particular for
> macro virii). We use resident scanners to prevent students from having to
> remember to scan disks before they access files. Once again, forgive my
> Linux newbie questions!

With email, virii are pretty much not a problem. Most virus writers that I 
have heard of try to attack Outlook or some part of a specific OS. Not only 
that, but a student would have to save the attachment, open a terminal (the 
admin could simply make it so that they can't open a terminal), become root 
(this would stop them dead in their tracks), type chmod +x filename, then 
./filename to run it. So as you can see email virii aren't a real problem for 
Linux. not only that but email clients default to text only. So, macro virii 
would would simply be seen is a bunch of gibberish, if seen at all.

For students to bring one in they would really have to make it their self, 
because there aren't that many Linux virii available. Correct me if I'm 
wrong, but I think that there were only two in 2001 for Linux while there 
were something like seven really big ones for Windows. This would really be 
pleasing to the admin at any school. Also, it wouldn't mess up the whole 
system because of its design.

My school got bite by Code Red, and Goner. This made the netowrk unusable for 
a day each. Not pretty from what I heard.

Chris