Re: Floored advice from government about Mac online safety

David wrote: 
Is anybody behind a 'firewalled' router with OSX's firewall switched on
acting on the Govt's antivirus software advice? My experience [and that
that I read about of many others] is that most of the Mac-specific
antivirus apps are much more trouble than they are worth.  Keep one
ready to deploy once somebody spots a serious threat?

I run AV software on the mail server for our home network, even though two of our workstations run Linux and the third is OS X. (The Linux boxes are dual-boot with WinXP, but that's just for a few specific apps and we never use email when running Windows).

The server is an older machine that I was going to pension off but decided it could do some useful admin tasks. It's running SuSE Linux and collects mail (fetchmail) from our numerous email accounts, acts as a POP3 server, is also a Usenet server (leafnode), MySQL server and web server for site development work and our intranet.

I started using AV software on it (AntiVir) when we were still using WinXP boxes regularly. I decided to continue because it's actually a useful way of just junking these annoying messages (we get 10-50 virus-bearing mails a day). In other words, it's a useful part of our anti-spam system (we also run SpamAssassin). As it runs in the background and doesn't take any resources from the machines we actually work on, I figure, 'why not?'.


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