[ale] Fun things NOT TO DO with F-Prot

[Bruce Griffis]

On Thursday 29 May 2003 10:53 pm, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> Sounds like a truly terrible day. Please tell some details of what
> happened. I have not had a problem with f-prot, but I mainly use it as
> part of MailScanner to clear out the disease in emails.
>
I had good luck running command line f-prot on my /home directories. No 
problems at all updating the virus def files. So I figured I'd make a script 
and hit each /home directory. Worked like a charm. Then I got c*cky and 
decided to scan the entire PC, starting from /, and signed in as root.

I ended up corrupting some files in /usr/lib. First noticed problems by seeing 
a segmentation fault while scanning my Windows "My Documents" folder, then 
noticed f-prot hanging while scanning the /mnt/windows partition when I 
restarted it. I put that to simply having Norton Anti-Virus installed on that 
partition - so tried again, skipping /mnt/windows. 

The scan seemed to hang (saw no progress, checked the process and didn't see 
it using any CPU cycles, just seemed to be sitting there). I decided to do a 
clean boot - and the system would not come up clean. I didn't write down the 
clobbered files, but they were in /usr/lib and prevented KDE from starting.

Back in business - but think I'll read a little more in-depth before su'ing to 
root and kicking off a process that has authority to delete, modify or 
disinfect every file on the system.

My original intention was to scan an Excel spreadsheet and some Word docs I 
downloaded. Wanted to check for macro viruses. I think if I stuck to that 
original intention, I would not have ended up with a messed up system.
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