[sf-lug] Linux Anti-Virus tool - comments requested...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Robert Johnson (emailbox6357 at gmail.com):

> Since I am a recovering Windows addict and for the near term have to
> continue to use Windows, what AV software do you guys recommend?  Or
> are you all using all FOSS?

Um, if you're asking about what AV software I'd recomment to use on
MS-Windows, I personally have no recommendation, and suspect this
mailing list is an unpromising place for you to ask, because, obviously,
this is not an MS-Windows-oriented mailing list.

But you said 'you guys', so maybe someone else will have ideas.  Almost
always, somebody does.  (Adjust your skepticism to suit.)


The last time I had MS-Windows on a personal machine of mine, it was
Windows for Workgroups 3.11, around 1993.  I had my spare 386 machine at
work at Blyth Software for use in the IT Department where I worked.  It 
was alongside the company-issued Macintosh IIci running MacOS System
6.x/7.x.

I found the corporate-issued antivirus software for both OSes to be
incredibly damaging to system stability and performance, but I had a
hypothesis:  That, as long as you carefully eschewed application
software with gross security-design defects, such as the infamous
'three-pane view' of contemporaneous versions of MS-Outlook, _and_ 
as long as you applied all needed software updates, the only way you
would ever execute a piece of malware is if you stupidly got fooled into
running it.  Therefore, you could simply avoid stupid errors and have
absolutely no need for antivirus software.  So, to test my hypothesis,
I made sure I always had complete and tested system backups, and
disabled all corporate-issued antivirus software.

I had greatly improved system stability and performance, and no problems
whatsoever.


> I got a copy of Ubuntu recently because it seemed more workable to
> transition from that OS to BSD (for some reason, I like BSD) to Linux
> or, again my favorite BSD...

I'm a longtime BSD guy (ran 386BSD before Linux existed), but am not
clear on what you are saying, there.