Re: [seul-edu] High School Educational Programs

["Christopher Hill" <minkus@ntlworld.com>]

> > 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.

It's not just a question of Linux virii but Windows virii as well, because
there may still be some people connecting to the network using Windows
computers (such as teachers with laptops), and it wouldn't be very nice if a
teacher loaded a Word document from a Samba share that 'worked fine on the
Linux computers' but gives their laptop a nasty macro virus.
--

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