Hi folks, This for those who are worried about disk defragmentation & viruses under linux. Here is a question in the Tech Support column of Linux Magazine on-line edition: I would like to ensure that my disk drives are defragmented and protected from nasty virii. What do I need to do? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Coming from a DOS/Windows world, it's easy to imagine that you must defragment a hard disk with some regularity to prevent your system's performance from degrading over time. Thankfully, in the Linux world, we do not have to bother with such things. The operating system itself will do "spring cleaning" when it reaches its maximum mount count. You will see a message when your root and other filesystems are mounted, claiming that the maximum mount count has been reached and a check is being forced. This is Linux's kind way of telling you it wants to take a look at things under the hood. Although there are disk defragmentation utilities available for Linux filesystems, they generally are not used because the operating system does such a great job of maintaining itself over the long haul. There have been lots of scares lately regarding unwanted gremlins that hide inside your system and attack it. The SuSE mailing list has carried warnings of several e-mail attachment viruses, and some of them were exposed as hoaxes. There is an anti-virus program which ships with SuSE 6.0 as part of the commercial packages, but I have never used it. I have never had a Linux system get corrupted or attacked by a virus, but I don't doubt that someone has written a virus which will attack ext2 filesystems or the boot sector. Overall, I do not feel so concerned regarding unwanted virii on a Linux system. It is also important to remember that as long as you are not running as root, the amount of damage you can do to your system is limited. Even if you were to somehow download a virus onto your computer, in theory the only things it could attack would be programs and files in a single user's directory. This question is there in the August issue of Linux Magazine. The articles in this magazine are really good. Good competition for linux journal. The on-line back issues can be downloaded from the www.linux-mag.com -- Rajesh(ALIAS Shriram) ---------------------------------------- Kurtarkar Nagari, Bldg-C, Flat No. T4, Third Floor, Shantinagar(Santacruz), Ponda-Goa-403401 Ph. : (0832)315932 Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Linux India Mailing List Archives are now available. Please search the archive at http://lists.linux-india.org/ before posting your question to avoid repetition and save bandwidth.