> From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Mack Rhinelander > > I'm deploying antivirus in our small office, and I'm researching best > practices. > > Is antivirus appropriate for Mac's/OS X?
No OS is perfect; they are all subject to vulnerabilities, so at least in theory, it is best practice to run antivirus to reduce the risk. In fact, viruses and malware do exist for macs / linux. However, in practice, I like to stick with the philosophy that you only get vaccinations or take antibiotics if the risks with them are lower than the risks without them. (In personal health, too.) In my experience so far, I've never seen mac or linux antivirus actually *defend* against a mac or linux virus. And I *have* on several occasions, seen the antivirus cause some harm. The clearest most dramatic example was when the CEO ran sophos on his mac. He had a huge tar.gz file backup of his most important stuff. For backup, he wanted to copy it out of there. So we mounted a samba share, and started a "cp" to copy it out. After an inordinately long time, computer crashed. I lost some hours working on it, and eventually figured out, that sophos saw him trying to write a tar.gz file, so sophos intercepted the behavior, caused IO wait for the "cp" process, meanwhile writing the whole thing from local disk to local disk in the tmp directory, and then extracted it to scan for viruses, before it would allow cp to actually write the new location. But there wasn't enough disk space for 3 copies of the same information on local disk. Solution: Uninstall sophos. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
