[Mimedefang] Notice: Dropping support for RAV AntiVirus

[Justin Shore]

I tried it once a while back.  The very first thing I noticed was that it
insisted on using what I consider an oddball directory structure that I do
not use: /opt.  In fact /opt is one of the many directories I remove
during the initial set up process on a fresh RH installation.  Every other
canned package I've worked with either let me decide where everything went
or used /usr/local.  The least it could do is conform to what I believe is
more common on BSD installations and install itself into
/usr/local/ravav-####.  Nevertheless I ultimately recreated the directory 
structure and installed it.  After some editing of the MD configure 
scripts (to detect ravav in /opt), I attempted to use it.  Never got it to 
work.  I eventually gave up and went the free route.  Thank you ClamAV.

While I think it would be wonderful to have every desktop in the world
with an AV product of some kind on it, I don't want it to be from a single
vendor and I certainly don't want that one vendor to be Microsoft.  Talk
about a cart that was created to be pulled by only their ass (no pun
intended, well, maybe it was a little bit).  This would be like MasterLock
creating poorly designed locks that are riddled with security problems and
then offering an alarm system to detect breakins.  One poorly designed
product creates the need for another product from the same company.

Justin


On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, David Prestwich wrote:

> That's allright, we tried ravav and it blew!  I give em 3 months before 
> it will install itself on a windows machine via a microsoft security 
> update for something like IE or media player.
> 
> 
> David F. Skoll wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Just a note that MIMEDefang 2.34 FINAL will no longer have RAV antivirus
> > support.  There are two reasons for this:
> > 
> > 1) RAV antivirus has a very restrictive license agreement that could
> > be interpreted as forbidding integration with software like MIMEDefang.
> > 
> > 2) Microsoft has purchased the makers of RAV
> > (http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/06/10/HNmsantivirus_1.html) and
> > is unlikely to maintain the Linux/UNIX versions of RAV antivirus anyway.