With proper setup and administration, viruses in Linux are the least of your worries, but you still need to worry about Windows clients that connect to your Linux servers. I have been looking at anti-virus programs, designed to run on Linux servers, that can keep viruses from infecting Windows clients on the networks I administer.
There are a growing number of companies and GNU Projects coming forward to provide Linux antivirus products. The Open Antivirus Project aims to provide open source solutions to multiple antivirus needs, including squid-vscan (virus scanning with squid), samba-vscan (on-access virus scanning with Samba), and VirusHammer (a standalone virus scanner to be run by end users). Many other features and projects are planned, like rescue disks and remote management. The Open Antivirus Project also has a project page at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openantivirus/.
Commercial products are becoming available in the mainstream for Linux. McAfee, Trendmicro, Panda Software, Sophos, and Central Command all have products for home Linux users as well as enterprise networks.
Installation for all of these products is straightforward and quite easy. Even novice users should be able to follow along without confusion. Most products provide the same basic capabilities, but some provided additional features, such as mail gateway server protection or file server protection. One thing I found disturbing with most products was the lack of SMP support. I run dual processor servers for better performance. Most of the antivirus programs gave a warning during install about not supporting SMP machines, while some simply would not function after installation under SMP. Trend Micro's ServerProtect, for example, installed nicely on my dual processor Red Hat Linux box, but failed to run. Only after trying to start the daemon manually did I discover that the application would not function on a dual processor box.
Antivirus solutions for Linux
