[Leaplist] Enterprise AV for Linux

[Phil Barnett]

On Thursday 11 December 2008 09:45:57 tony_l_turner at yahoo.com wrote:

> Our enterprise (18,000 users or so) AV solution where I work does not
> support Linux and we are looking for a product that we can use to manage
> our growing number of Linux machines. We have no plans to go to Vista and
> are entertaining the idea of moving from XP to Ubuntu in another year or
> two and migrating our file and print and some web app servers to RHEL or
> Centos and are in early testing phase now for application connectivity
> issues. Can anyone recommend a good Linux AV suitable for enterprise
> deployment? I've looked at Big Fix and Panda and both seem to be decent
> products but wanted to query the group to see if perhaps I'm overlooking a
> better solution.
>
> Ideally I'd like to have a central dashboard for all AV but I don't see us
> divorcing ourselves from our current product anytime soon.

This sounds like a Windows enterprise mindset trying to solve a Windows 
problem in a *nix world. For the most part, once Windows is gone from your 
infrastructure, so are the virus, trojan and hijack problems without an ounce 
of virus scanning or protection of any kind.

The problems that remain are stupid user tricks which no operating system can 
solve, but *nix can greatly mitigate by not running as root by default. With 
actual controls that keep that from happening and SELinux which acts like an 
application firewall. Windows in many cases forces people to be administrators 
or junior administrators (power user) just to get the software to run. This 
happens more often as the mix of software get's larger and more complex. Like 
in a large enterprise. And it's the death of Windows.

After a decade of living with Linux, I haven't seen the problem that you are 
trying to solve. And my feeling is that trying to solve a Windows problem on 
Linux is a waste of time. Of course, any big enterprise is also good at things 
like that...

-- 
"Ninety percent of politicians give the other 10 percent a bad name." -- Henry 
Kissinger


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