[Wylug-discuss] Eeepc and virus protection

[Martin Rowe]

On 15/04/2008, Nigel Metheringham
<nigel.metheringham at dev.intechnology.co.uk> wrote:
>
>  On 15 Apr 2008, at 14:21, ALLEN, David wrote:
>
[snip]
>
>  Does it have anti-virus?  Don't remember seeing that.  In terms of
> effectiveness it will be crap because Asus's approach to OS development is
> to throw a copy over the wall and never ever supply updates.

The Eee does have anti-virus (see the Settings tab). It appears to be
a KDE front end to ClamAV calling itself Xandros Anti-Virus. According
to the config it's set to update definitions daily (12:00 AM).

>  The Eee PC does appear to be an attempt to prove or disprove the statements
> about Linux not being hit by viruses/defacements/worms due to it having such
> a low profile and therefore not being subject to attack from crackers.  As
> shipped it has some long standing (there is a multi-year old serious Samba
> security hold) security issues, and I don't think these have been officially
> dealt with as yet (I don't run the supplied OS on the one we have so haven't
> been keeping up to date with the original OS situation).

I ran an update the other day and it told me there was an update to
the Xandros samba package to fix a security issue, so it would seem
this has been looked at.


>  If I was looking at deploying these to a group I would change them all to a
> better maintained distribution, with auto updates and a better initial
> configuration that made them rather more secure - especially if they are not
> being used on just a few home networks.  I wouldn't bother with virus
> protection - general security maintenance is much more of an issue with
> non-windows boxes.

I've done okay with the default OS so far, as it's Debian based and I
can install most of what I want, but I think I'll drop Ubuntu 8.04 on
it once the process has been trail-blazed.

Regards, Martin
-- 
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