LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: David Lloyd <lloy0076@adam.com.au>
  To  : Jim O <Jim@kendle.com.au>
  Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 22:36:35 +1030

Re: Anti-virus & Anti-spam on sendmail

Jim et al,

> We use Amavis with McAfee on our mail server...  Amavis is a
> performance bottleneck, but that's mainly because its processing an
> average of 600 messages a day on a Pentium 75 with 32mb of RAM. 
> Performance is barely acceptable under load, but if you have
> respectable hardware it'd be fine.  

I'm not sure any solution could do much better than AmaVis. Conceptually
AmaVis:

1) unrolls all messages into a spooling directory
 - i.e extracts the message and all MIME parts

2) invokes a virus scanner on the parts

3) works out results

4) deals with the message appropriately

Now, AmaVis can be run in daemon mode and I suspect that a virus scanner
could be run in daemon mode which would avoid a lot of process creation
but the above step, especially (1) and (2) take a long time.

No matter what you run.

And you can't really expect AmaVis to put (1) into memory because the
"real viruses" (such as the love bug) generally bombard mail servers. So
you sort of have to plan for the worst.

*sigh*


DSL

(Bill should write a little virus checker into Windows that says "You
are running a GPL program - this will taint the Windows Kernel!")

-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/ IRC: #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject