These classnotes are depreciated. As of 2005, I no longer teach the classes. Notes will remain online for legacy purposes

UNIX03/Sophos For Linux

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Sophos has a wide variety of products for many different platforms available. Everything from the many Windows varients, to Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unixes are supported.

Utlimately, I'll be honest with you, I don't really like the Windows clients. They are difficult to update, especially automatically, which can make maintaining even a small number of Windows boxes tedious. That being said, they do provide many excellent features and with the addition of some extra software (my preference is CYGWIN) you can automate the updates.

The Unix/ Linux versions of their software isn't that much better. The viral "sweep" utility mirrors the Windows version almost exactly which means it feels krufty under a Unix/ Linux machine. Sweep is especially useless for automated sweeps (from cron or, heaven forbid, if integrated into a mail gateway like what we have just set up) because it requires fairly significant overhead. Mailmonitor and some of Sophos' other tools do little more to make their *nix offerings seem very palatable.

So why is it that I prefer Sophos under Unix rather than some alternative?

Simple.... Sophos is very friendly to the Open Source community. They recently purchased ActiveState, and have committed some code to various projects. They actually welcome third-party Open Source developers to use their viral identities in their applications. But most importantly, they have released an open API for their underlying Sophos Anti Virus libraries under Unix.

This means that third-party developers (esp. Open Source developers) can take their functioning SAV core and augment it. As a result, we have some exquisite tools available for the Linux or Unix system administrator which can snap onto to your SAV and provide new features.



Classnotes | UNIX03 | RecentChanges | Preferences
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Last edited October 4, 2003 1:23 am (diff)
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(C) Copyright 2003 Samuel Hart
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