Ubuntu linux help
There were some very informative comments from readers, which showedthat in reality it would be very difficult to develop Linux basedviruses, and that the real use would be to protect Windows users. Aftersome thought and a bit of playing, I was introduced to ClamAV. For those not familiar, their site description says:
“…Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit forUNIX, designed especially for email scanning on mail gateways. Itprovides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalablemulti-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool forautomatic database updates. The core of the package is an anti-virusengine available in a form of shared library…“
For me at least, this was a clear challenge to roll up my sleevesand create a small antivirus server (used to scan email). This would beuseful to the small business owner, school, club or hobbyists ingeneral. I’m not going to post the setup ofthe mail server for this (there are tons of tutorials on line), I’lljust be writing about the installation of clamAV on the server.
Depending on your platform, you should see the appropriate documentation here: http://www.clamav.org/download/packages/packages-linux. However, as I’m using Ubuntu Linux, I’ll simply run the following command on the mail server to install the package:
sudo apt-get install clamav clamav-daemon clamav-docs
clamav is the software and clamav-daemon is the service that willrun the mail server modules that checks email attachments. The daemonwill also ensure that the virus definitions are automatically updated.Be aware that the command will also install:
clamav-base
clamav-freshclam (Run by the daemon to keep the definitions updated).
After the installation is complete, you’ll be able to scan files manually using:
sudo clamscan -r /
Or… better to have it run automatically using cron like this:
sudo vi crontab -e
(you can use nano, vi, whatever, it does not matter - just as longas it’s a pure text editor) and add the following code to the
*/10 * * * * sudo clamscan -r /
The above will scan the mail directory every 10 minutes.
Again, I’m not espousing that Linux “needs” anti virus protection.Rather, I’m suggesting one method we could use to protect all members,(by attempting to reduce virus transmission) to Windows and otherplatforms. If you need to remove this solution (because you’re just trying this out), the command to do so would be:
sudo apt-get autoremove clamav clamav-daemon clamav-docs
The “autoremove” statement will also remove the dependencies that were installed with clamav.
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