Re: Anti-virus for i5OS

David Gibbs wrote:

Well, yes and no. AV software serves a useful role, IMO ... because
sometimes it's hard to tell when code is actually going to be installed
(which, imo, is a big problem in an of itself). A few days ago, A
co-worked loaned me a flash drive to move some software around. As soon
as I inserted the flash drive, the system recognized two devices ... the
flash drive and a 'CD ROM'. It then proceeded to install software that
was on the 'CD ROM' automatically. It didn't ask me if I wanted to
install it, it just started to install it.

This kind of thing is what AV software protects against.

Yeah, but you're kind of sliding away from the topic, which is i5/OS. I don't stick auto-run CDs and flash drives on my System i. And frankly, this is a darned good argument to turn off that "feature" on your desktop.

But at the same time, I wouldn't hesitate to put not only anti-virus, but also system integrity software (I like Desktop Armor) on all of your desktops, especially since you can get high-quality packages for free. If there were an AntiVir equivalent for i5/OS, I might consider it, but then again, AV software tends to really chew cycles; I think I'd prefer locking down my machine so it didn't need it.

One of my clients has two partitions: a production and a development partition. The production partition is just about read-only for everything except customer data.

Joe