Inbox Question: AV on Lotus Notes/Domino for Linux?
I got this question forwarded to me today and it was quite a good, reasonable question that I had to look into it to find out the answer because it was something I had never encountered to date.
Here’s the question with the names not fully reported to protect the guilty..er….innocent:
We currently run Lotus Notes on a Windows server and are looking to move to a Linux server.
We now have Mcafee, but I do not believe they have a product for Linux that works with Lotus Notes.
Do you have any suggestions/recommendations for anti-virus for the Lotus Notes server only.
thank you
Joe
Well Joe, here’s what I found out.
Started my search on Notes.net which is the first place to check for any questions regarding Notes/Domino…hell anything Lotus. Their forums are searchable and loaded full of nuggets of good info which has saved my bacon more than a few times.
Anyway, a quick browse through their forums shows very little information on Antivirus for Linux and Notes.
But…Google is your friend!
It turns out you do have options here.
There is:
- The venerable Symantec
- Trend Micro’s offering
- And if you like McAfee, you can stick with it!
- AVG has an offering for mail servers on Linux, but I am unsure of if it will work on a Domino box.
One quick caveat. To date, there has never been a virus written to successfully exploit Lotus Notes/Domino. All viruses have been to exploit the underlying operating system. Now that doesn’t mean that you do not need to have an AV product, I will say that you do.
But you also have other options.
Have you considered putting an anti-spam/virus/malware gateway in front of your Domino servers?
At my shop, we put this VMWare Virtual Appliance, ESVA as our gateway back in February. It uses a mixture of different technologies to filter nasties out of your email.
I put this in on our network in February, and to date not a single virus has made it to my Domino server!
Hope that answered your questions. And don’t forget to check out our $300 give-a-way of a 2GB Crucial Memory Module!
October 9, 2007 - 8:32 pm
Great information Sloth as always you da man!
I hope it helps you Joe. Let us know in the comments!
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October 9, 2007 - 9:46 pm
It’s ok to put anti-virus on your notes clients but I’d strongly advise against putting it on the domino server.
The mail server is just too important to be stuffed around by security software. You should use an appliance or a service.
Appliance: Any Gateway firewall which has anti-spam and anti-virus filtering built-in.
Service: IMHO Even better. Pick a service that will scan inbound and outbound mail and redirect your traffic there first. You can have your spam sent to a special account eg: spam@mycompany.com so that it’s recoverable in case of over-sensitive filters.
If you look around hosting sites, you’ll be able to locate a service that uses multiple products. We did that and have never looked back.
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October 9, 2007 - 10:36 pm
We love the Barracuda spam firewall 310. We use it with Imail 2006 we are going to be converting to ln in the first half of 08. Will the cudda’ be enough?
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October 9, 2007 - 11:54 pm
My company supports school systems across several counties.
We use Sophos Anti-Virus, which has low, per client licensing, that allows staff/students to also use it at home. I don’t think any other enterprise product allows for that.
SAV has Linux covered:
http://www.sophos.com
/products/enterprise
/endpoint
/security-and-control
/linux/index.html
From the site:
Sophos Endpoint Security and Control provides superior on-access scanning for Linux desktops, laptops and servers, delivering excellent performance, stability and reliability, along with out-of-the-box support for the widest range of Linux distributions.
About the company:
Sophos is a world leader in IT security and control solutions purpose-built for business, education, government organizations and service providers. Our reliably engineered, easy-to-operate products protect over 100 million users in more than 150 countries from viruses, spyware, adware, Trojans, intrusion, spam, policy abuse, and uncontrolled network access.
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October 10, 2007 - 1:48 am
@ Gavin:
Why do you believe a service is better than a gateway appliance? Just trying to pick your brain here.
My thoughts on this is that a service like say Postini costs a number of dollars per month, per mail box. That can add up big time.
The appliances also do have subscriptions and support for the most part, but I suspect that you’d run cheaper in terms of dollars and cents than a service over the cost of the year.
I do understand that having the leverage of millions of dollars in infrastructure of the service provider is a big time bonus, especially in the event of a disaster situation, but we are VERY cost conscious here in our IT department.
Also of note, the ‘appliance’ I recommended is virtual and the jew in me(yes…part jew, 50% actually) LOVES the price tag on it!!!! FREE!!!
With that said, thank you for stopping by Gavin, and I will be bookmarking your Domino blog tomorrow at work as I saw some things on there of interest.
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