RAV AntiVirus 8.5 for Linux Review

RAV AntiVirus v8.5 for Linux Mail Servers, Servers, and Workstations is flexible and scalable, allowing independent configuration of the scanning module, fully independent from the Mail Server

In the configuration file you can customize the actions to be taken by RAV when detecting a virus - clean, move, copy, rename, delete, ignore, reject - and benefit of advanced features, like warning the sender, warning the receiver or warning a third party (the server administrator when detecting an external threat).

Features

RAV works with all known Linux variants including RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, Mandrake Linux, Debian Linux, Slackware Linux, Black Cat Linux, etc. The only requirements are glibc-2.1.3 libraries. , gtk+-1.2.8 ,glib 1.2.8 and XFree86-libs-3.3.5

Operating system support

• Linux
• OpenBSD
• FreeBSD
• Solaris8
• Windows NT
• Windows 2000

Mail servers

• EXIM
• Sendmail
• Qmail
• Postfix
• Communigate PRO
• MS Exchange 5.5

Email scanning

• Archives inside archives
• Packed executables
• Multiple MIME-type encodings
• Group configuration
• Warning notifications sender / receiver / third party
• Enhanced e-mail traffic scan

The Install

Installation is simple via the interactive install script. To install unzip (gunzip filename) and untar the file (tar -xvf filename), cd to the RAV directory and run ./install, select option 3 in most cases. There is a very complete INSTALL document included with all distributions.

You must edit the [global] portion of /usr/local/rav8/etc/ravmd.conf to indicate the domains you wish to scan. Subdomains count as separate domains. There are complete installation instructions in the INSTALL file that comes with your specific distribution. Installation requires that you temporarily (a few minutes) stop your mail server. If you prefer no to use RPM's binary files are available.

The Low Down

For ISP's RAV AntiVirus is the perfect solution for the ISP`s Mail Servers, which are dealing with heavy traffic and large amount of clients. RAV AntiVirus can improve the services to your customers by scanning the email flow and add protection against viruses for the domains hosted, allowing you to purchase security on a growing basis through a special acquisition program.

For Companies Large corporations with demanding security policies and small companies with limited budgets can both protect their Internet traffic at a proper cost. Due to the extremely flexible licensing system. you can acquire different packages, depending on your needs of protection. RAV AntiVirus is licensed per domain. The more domains you support, the less you pay per domain. RAV claims to update their virus definitions everyday.

The RAV engineering team, based in Bucharest, Romania, is vigilant about keeping the virus database up to date and are confident that the RAV database is one of the most complete and up to date in the world. RAV Updates are run automatically via cron script that is automatically created during the installation on Unix variants. If you choose you may manually update your virus defs using ravav -u. If you want the update script to run more than once a day then schedule it using crontab.