Best AV for Itanium IA64 (Windows 2000, 2003, NT)

Hi there

I am hoping for a quick response to this one, because we're in a tight spot right now where the Itaniums we have don't support McAfee to run on Windows server setup on our Itanium machine. Does anyone have any idea (perhaps based on good experience themselves?) on what is a good AV that supports this machine?

I remembered using Sophos back in the day, but that was for RHEL on Itanium..not sure if it would work on Windows, checked Sophos site tho, their endpoint life cycle for their latest version (v10) expires in 2014 and I was hoping for a 'long term' support

Thank you all!

clamAV is open source

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For windows?

yes (and unix and macos)

really?! I think you may just be right, let me propose this to my team..i like the idea of it being free but free usually means no support and i'll have to think about this one...but thank you for your feedback:b:

Yes - and gravity is a myth because the earth is flat, otherwise we would fall off it.

Welcome to the stories providers of non-free software tell to make open-source look bad. "free" means usually as much support as a vendor provides but carried out in a different way.

If a software you buy doesn't do exactly what you want it to do chances are that the vendor is willing to provide you with a modification if it suits him to do so. Chances are, on the other hand, that he doesn't because it doesn't suit his goals and it would be too much effort to create a special version of his product only for you. So maybe you get what you want, maybe not. If not you will simply have to change your environment so that the product in question fits in somehow.

The same is true for copylefted software: you might get the developer community to change the product in a future version like you want it to be changed or you might not get the developers to do so. In this case you have to do the same as with the bought product OR you can modifiy it yourself to build the missing functionality.

Linux is open-source. Is it used? Has anybody suffered because of lacking support?
Apache is open-source. Is it used? Has anybody suffered because of lacking support?
Mozilla Firefox is open-source. Is it used? Has anybody suffered because of lack of support?
ClamAV is open-source. You tell me if it being open-source is a problem or not.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

@bakunin you've got a faily good point there but I am dealing with a rigid customer and frankly they're going to question the whole free support thing. So i think the best will be if I provide both Sophos and Clam to them and see where they take off from there.

From 25+ years experience: The price you pay for software seems to have absolutely no relation at all in relation to the end-user experience (usability + support).

When it comes to anti-virus software, I can't recommend anything, actually, because I'm the kind of user that simply doesn't download viruses. If I download something I don't trust, I'll scan it manually with clamAV because over the long-run, it pays to be a little cautious.

Your situation is a bit special because the Itanium line has such little industry support from the software sector. Anti-virus software is no different. Why should a vendor spend resources for something he will sell very few copies of?

Viruses themselves must be tailored to the specific hardware (excluding "macro" viruses which infect things like Word and Excel documents, or Browser exploits which infect via JavaScript and ActionScript / Flash ). They must use attack vectors built specifically for that hardware -- thus, the version on the OS you use, the version of Office, etc, are all compiled specifically for Itanium. A malware author would have to tailor the malware specifically for these components. By this line of thinking, there is little benefit to leveraging existing x86-based malware signatures -- you need a database of signatures specific for Itaniums.

Thus, in this case, relying on open tools makes more sense than non-open ones: the sparse nature of the installations dictates a cost/benefit model toward openness -- it will be people like you who find and diagnose the infections, and people like you who will help contribute to the database of malware signatures.

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@otheus hmmm that makes sense too, I never thought of looking at the HW architecture of the machines in that way. i very much doubt we will have an invasion for this customer, security wise...but thank you again for your detailed explanation. I think it just answered a lot of muddled questions in my head

I hereby declare this issue solved! :smiley: