Text 53899, 66 rader
Skriven 2009-03-05 19:47:32 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 53897 av Jean Parrot (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: Old system and user.
============================
Jean Parrot -> Alan Zisman wrote:

 AZ>> But sometimes change is needed. Recently, my school district
 JP> discovered
 AZ>> itself with systems- including servers running the library databases
 AZ>> among other things- infected with the downadup/conflicker worm. In
 AZ>> response, technicians came to scan each of the 10,000+ computers in
 AZ>> schools, district offices, etc.

 JP>     Are they on monthly or per saved machine basis ?

I'm not sure what you mean by this?

 JP> Good grief, 10,000+
 JP> machines to service. I look after 12 here and some days I have my hands
 JP> full.

It took about 3 weeks for them to make a first pass through all the schools,
office, etc. During that time, users were strongly requested to leave Windows
computers off... that was when I decided to set my lab full of systems (32
workstations) to dual-boot to Ubuntu, so that for the time it took to be
visited by a technician- and certified virus-clean, we were not running
Windows.


 JP>     How would one notice, detect this downadup malware ? I ran a full
 JP> Avast yesterday and it detected nil. Is downadup Avast proof ?

Hopefully Avast is aware of it- it was the major security story of
January/February with an estimated 12 million + systems worldwide affected. The
British Royal Navy noted that it had put the computers on some military vessels
out of operation.

Symantec (and others) have free scan/clean tools for downadup-- I had checked
all my lab, library, and school office systems with it to verify that we were
free of infection, prior to our 'official' technician visit.

For Symantec's tool: http://tinyurl.com/cuu2pl

 JP>     On a side note, my #1 daughter got an 8.3" laptop, an Asus c/w 160 G
 JP> of SS HD. Her first question was: Do you have a USB CD-ROM ?  I managed
 JP> to get one going, using the control connector from a 3.5" USB HD box.
 JP> Necessity is the mother of invention.

I've got a Dell Mini 9 netbook (16 GB flash drive) on order... it's taking them
3 weeks or so for delivery... I'm thinking of converting it from XP Home to
Ubuntu-- though there are some interesting online articles on putting OS X onto
that model.

Dell sells the same model with Ubuntu pre-installed, but ironically, in Canada
at least, the Ubuntu model is $30 more expensive than what I paid for XP Home--
and ships with 512 MB Ram and a 4 GB flash drive, where the one I ordered has 1
GB of RAM and a 16 GB drive. Economy of scale, perhaps- and it may be cheaper
for Dell to support Windows installations than Ubuntu installations.

I may try to create a bootable flash drive with the Ubuntu install files and
install from there rather than cobble together an external USB optical drive.

-- 
==================================
- email: alan (at) zisman (dot) ca
- website: http://www.zisman.ca
(running on Mac OS X)

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