Integrating Anti-Virus Solutions For FreeBSD Network Security

Anti-virus software for FreeBSD is not a common thought to most FreeBSD administrators. However, if you're like me, most of my networks are Windows 2000/NT on the workstations, and FreeBSD on the servers. This means that the average user can download . . . Anti-virus software for FreeBSD is not a common thought to most FreeBSD administrators. However, if you're like me, most of my networks are Windows 2000/NT on the workstations, and FreeBSD on the servers. This means that the average user can download all kinds of unhealthy files and contaminate the Windows workstations. I prefer to spend most of my time doing something other than running Norton Antivirus. The solution to this i thought would be anti-virus software that runs under FreeBSD as a centralized anti-virus scanner. Such software can be integrated into the FreeBSD server's Mail Transfer Agent to protect peoples' email accounts, and by using smbfs or Sharity, you can even do a full scan of the Windows computers on your network from remote. This keeps your Windows clients free from the resource crunch that can be caused by installed anti-virus software. The virus scanning software does not degrade the workstation's performance, nor can a knowledgeable user disable it.

Concluding that Anti-virus software for FreeBSD is an effective way to protect a network and email, one must determine which Anti-virus software to use. There are not however many to choose from. In my original deployment I used UVSCAN from the FreeBSD ports tree, it uses the scanning engine and virus definitions from McAfee.

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