[StuartinKingston]

From an education establishments point of view....

What virus software do you use/recommend?

This is more of a courtesy to the PC users so we don't pass anything on to them, or if caught by the College eMail system the eMail is not lost in quarantine.

Cheers,

Stuart.

[angelmb]

I use Virex (now rebranded as VirusScan) McAfee Virex for Macintosh - AntiVirus Protection for Macintosh - SMB but I wonder if a free alternative like ClamXav would make for a better choice -economically wise speaking-.

[ghporter]

My school provides Symantec Client Security (their corporate suite) to students, faculty, and employees for free (obviously they got a great site license deal). I am required to install this on my computers if I want to connect them to the school network, PC or Mac. Works great for me.

[CharlesS]

I just use ClamAV and have it autoscan my Downloads folder, although you could have it autoscan your Mail folder as well.

[Cold Warrior]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

My school provides Symantec Client Security (their corporate suite) to students, faculty, and employees for free (obviously they got a great site license deal). I am required to install this on my computers if I want to connect them to the school network, PC or Mac. Works great for me.

Out of curiosity, how do they know if it's installed and in use? Since it's your personal machine, they can't manage or track it like a corporate PC on the LAN.

[StuartinKingston]

ClamXav doesn't seem to repair files if they are infected, am I right?

Virex and Symantic I keep getting mixed reviews. It is important that it is able to repair files with viruses, so I guess it's a toss up between these two.

Thanks for your replies!

[TETENAL]

When would "repairing" a file with a virus even be useful? The only time I could think this could even work would be Office files with macros, but if you get some of those with viruses they are hardly containing any useful content anyway.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

Out of curiosity, how do they know if it's installed and in use? Since it's your personal machine, they can't manage or track it like a corporate PC on the LAN.

For university-owned machines, particularly ones that are connected to the network all the time, they push updates, and I think they could find out whether a computer that was on the network didn't accept the update pretty easily. For student computers, it's part of the written network access agreement that a student has to sign in order to get access to the network at all. So it's an honor thing for the most part, but with so many of my classmates still having PCs, I find it to be a "good neighbor" policy to avoid passing a virus from one of them on to another.

Frankly, this requirement is and always has been a Good Thing for most students. Through the past two years, more and more classmates bought Macs because they got sick of having their PC laptops goobered by who knows what malware and crapware they ran into. Every time one of them said "I think there's something wrong with my computer," I sent them to the IT support guy and told them to ask for the disc. I helped more than one set this suite up and boy were there bad things to find! Suffice to say that absolute brilliance in one field does NOT cross over into smart or even bright computing.

[StuartinKingston]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

When would "repairing" a file with a virus even be useful? The only time I could think this could even work would be Office files with macros, but if you get some of those with viruses they are hardly containing any useful content anyway.

More to stop the look on the staff users face from changing to terror when I have to tell them they must delete that file without looking like I've done something to resolve the issue.. sure Office and macros will probably be the cause of 90% of any virus warning, but also the appearance of having looked to have tried to resolve the issue is always good, even though I might know nothing can be done from the start.

[Kenneth]

On the Windows side, we use Symantec AV Corp edition on every single lab machine and students brought-in laptops. In addition to that, we have Cisco Clean Access to ensure the workstations are fully patched and having the latest virus definition. However, Mac and Vista machine do not need those extra software to gain access to the school network.