Hi everyone,
I was recently at a meeting with some very sharp counterparts of mine. A rather interesting question came up concerning anti-virus and public computers in libraries. Should libraries still consider placing anti-virus software on the computers if after reboots, all the previous actions are then wiped away? A very good question, and probably 99% of the time, there should be no real danger. The only time that perhaps a problem may present itself is if a worm or other variances of a virus,spyware, or nusicanes propagated its way to the staff PCs which did not have desktop management software. And because of that reason, is why I still endorse using anti-virus software on public PCs in the library.
Now if you would rather not pay for anti-virus there is a solution. I can't take credit for this as I found this product through this very meeting with my counterparts. It is a product called ClamWin. There are some anti-virus software that are both free and effective but free to home users and not to libraries. ClamWin is a free open source product and is without any restrictions on where it can and can't be used. It will run on the Windows platform including Vista. I have installed the software on a test machine and tested it with a few test false viruses and it did pick those up.
In my opinion I still believe you should keep anti-virus on those machines, but now with ClamWin available, you have a free option to consider. If you have a comment about this topic, let's hear from you and I will post for all to see.
2 comments:
Hey Rodney, I'm a first time commenter/long time reader. :-)
Has ClamWin added real-time scanning? I remember looking at it a while ago but it did not have that feature yet. Thanks!
Paul,
First glad that you are a long time reader. I appreciate that. You are absolutely correct about that. As of this writing there is no real time scanning. And that did concern me. But then I thought of a few things to do with ClamWin. 1) Set up scanning on a scheduler, they do provide that. At a time that is convenient for the library of course. 2) If there was a problem on their network, which involved the network slowing down and a virus was an option to look at, then to force a full scan could be done as well. I hope they will come up with this option and very soon. But as stated before usually desktop management software takes away any problem once rebooted. Thanks so much for the feedback Paul.
Rodney
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