Yeah Bob that is good to hear thank you I will definitely try them out.

Right now I'm muscling my way thru firewall scripts for an old pc that has XFCE in. I didnt realize that KDE was a requirement for guarddog

Oh well I gotta learn the firewall scripts any-who...baptism by fire baby !

wow,cannot beleive i slept on gaim this long. looks really good.
i cannot login to MSN still though - says i need SSL enabled. I have never had a problem with SSL websites before. I wonder if this is since enabling the firewall (probably more like the way i installed firefox =) )

Ooops =) all is good now, just had to add path to firefox in /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig.

To add my $.02:

I do not use an anti-virus program in Linux... nor Windows. Windows in not allowed on the Internet.

For anti-SPAM I use spamassassin. It takes some time to configure, but I think it is well worth it.

I used Guarddog for a couple of years and I think it is excellent. I moved to fwbuilder because it has some advance features guarddog is lacking. If not for that, I would still be on guarddog. I also have a DSL modem with a built in "firewall" but I don't think that is really enough.

Be sure to disable any non-essential daemons.

-JJ

That is a really good tip to deny windows access to the internet, especially since they are soo focused on getting longhorn out the door. I have already noticed that the amount of updates for windows 2000 is well sparse, and I havent seen and update for win98 in a long time except for the patch that messed up everyone's computers for the outlook express.

I'm using that 'antivir' right now. It seems to be working if I use it from terminal, and it updates automatically. I get the gui working but I dont think the constant running in the background scanning files on access is working. most of the time i simply find myself doint "antivir --scan-mode=smart" in console.

The real time protection is something with the kernel, but I cant figure it out yet. I had this same issue when I first tried out linux with Mepis and clam-av too.

I read an interesting article tho yesterday in the 'tech' section of yahoo news and it said that Kaspersky labs (i believe) states that there are 860 something or so malwares for Linux last year alone. Tho later in the article because of this bootcamp for Mac that they believe that Mac's are the next golden goose for viruses & malwares; and that linux is still very safe for the short term they claim.

My question is : how do I know that I dont get malware? In the windows world malware is not treated like a virus. In the windows world you buy anti-malware and anti-virus. In the windows world, normally anti-virus companies like 'antivir' let's say, would not write definitions to look for malware's.

Is there any anti-spyware/malware for linux? It seem's that the antivir is really geared to help linux people get rid of windows viruses on their pc's and the few know for linux. I see yahoo has their toolbar and they are in beta right now for linux for spyware, but is there anything else out there?

I've read a web-page where this guy was totally paranoid about viruses and spyware's, and so he wrote himself an application for linux that md5 checksums/inventories his entire pc nightly, now that's a little extreme, but then again maybe it's not.

You could have a look at tripwire (security and data integrity tool) or snort, a real time IDS (Intrusion Detection Scanner) that help you identifying remote attacks and alterations to your software. Also a program like logwatch can condense your logfiles to a format (emailed to you daily) that is well suited as a high-level overview of what happened on your computer the day before.

But most of the problems people have with malware and viruses still stems from thoughtless use of the Internet (reading email included). No scanner/firewall will protect the stupid from harm inflicted to his/her computer.

Eric

On my personal Linux machines I don't run any av. I use Firefox with popup blocking turned on and don't allow any scripts unless I trust the site I'm viewing. For mail I run Thunderbird with it's built in anti spam tools trained to my liking, and NEVER open mail from someone I don't know.

Things like tripwire require due-diligence, the same due-diligence that says you don't open emails from unknown sources, open HTML mail, etc. If one is too lazy to check what is in an email or what comes up on their screen before clicking through... they are most likely not going to take the time to setup and monitor the tripwire outputs.

-JJ

Can you post a link? I'd like to read that article.

-JJ

you guys should take a look at this and its up to you to decide whom you should believe :

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=31092

It seems over the past few days no logs have been written to /var/log/firewall at all..
I had previous added:

kern.warn -/var/log/firewall
to: /etc/syslog.conf

/etc/rc.d/rc.firewall defiantely loads when my machine boots and all the Ip modules are present... just doesnt seem to be creating any logs based on IP traffic

** Update: Okay just ran nmap from another pc on my LAN and did a full port scan on this mahine and the logs lit up..
looks like the NAT firewall in my router must work pretty well on the internet... cool!

Good job Graz.

Hey just an update. This "Antivir" antivirus is pretty neat. I put it on a few slack pc's even my friends old p66 laptop; very stable. The GUI takes a while to load as it is Java based. The real time scanning is fine on a pc that is 1.5 GHz or above. Below that because Linux is all script based the max settings for security/paranoia make the pc really slow. Logs all the updates and start/stop events. No scheduler for virus scans tho.

:LOL:

I viewed the original posting with some reservations and wanted to see it in print, so to speak.

I followed the link, I am loading FreeBSD on my main computer as I type. I cannot afford to deal with these Linux/Windows viruses.

tongue-in-cheek

-JJ

Amazing. This is why I set out to get AV on my pc, as it's apparent to me that Linux is gaining ground, recognition and it's only a matter of when.

Oh I tried BSD...and like gentoo...I couldnt figure out how to "startX" after installing. LOL so good luck with that.

I saw a commercial on TV the other day, Apple touting the lack of viruses on Mac's. How quickly they have forgotten the Mac's problems with viruses in the 80's. Mac's viruses were spread through transferring files.

Windows viruses are spread through email (currently).

Most of what I have seen in the *nix world are direct attacks on computers. It all probability, you are correct. Although I do not see viruses becoming the plague they are on Windows.

(FreeBSD) I got my startx going fairly quick. Had to hack the xorg.conf file. X -configure was just about worthless. I generated the file then hacked it together from my slackware xorg.conf file. After I figured out how to mount my reiserfs partitions under FreeBSD. Which turned out to be a simple mount -t reiserfs /dev/ad1s2 /mnt/slackroot. Google says you have to compile a kernel... turned out reiserfs was already built in.

Thanks... I just did a FreeBSD upgrade... nuked KDE... Oops

-JJ

I heard BDS was really good on old pc's and that slackware derived from it, so I was just playing around with it. But it's not to know there is misery in company, that I wasnt the only one who had a hard time to startx LOL sorry, but it does make me chuckle in a way. They (gentoo, BSD) dont tell you how to start after you reboot. Oh and I didnt like their brand of cfdisk either. Gosh, it must have wanted to make 1000 partitions...for various items, argh.