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FTP + viruses



Dear Folks,

	I think the information about viruses below may be of  
sufficient interest to merit a reply to the entire mailing group.   
This is my response to the questions posed by John Troxell  
<unmvax!pucc.Princeton.EDU!JKTROXE%ERENJ.BITNET>.

	--Cliff

>>     What are good archive sites for mac software?

sumex.stanford.edu has an "info-mac" subdirectory that has tons of  
stuff.  There are many others, check out the FAQ (answers to  
Frequently Asked Questions) in the various mac newsgroups if you have  
access to netnews.

>>     Do I just uncompress/untar in ExecutorVolume?

Pick up the files as either ".hqx" or ".bin" and put them within  
ExecutorVolume and run Binhex on them.  Make sure you use "binary"  
mode to transfer files whose extension is ".bin".  If you have NCSA  
telnet you can use the "Macbinary" option to copy files from a Mac  
over to your machine, where you can unbinhex them (don't use  
"Macbinary" with .hqx or .bin files, they are already in a form  
Binhex understands).

>>     Are mac viruses a potential threat to the NeXT?

Yes and No and Yes:

	Yes) viruses could mess up the "mac universe" that Executor  
provides you with.  As far as I know the threat is limited to your  
MACVOLUMES.  I suppose someone could write a virus that specifically  
guns for the rest of your NeXT but with only a couple hundred people  
running Executor, I doubt anyone would go to the trouble of doing  
that.

	No) I suspect that most viruses won't work anyway because we  
do not execute code out of the system file.  The standard "MDEF"s are  
compiled into Executor and are special cased.  I really don't know  
much about all the virsuses that are out there so I make no promises.

	Yes) One serious consiseration about viruses is right now I  
know of no way to detect them under Executor.  The virus checkers  
that run as INITs or CDEVs won't work because we don't support INITs  
or CDEVs.  I don't know about the virus checkers that examine your  
filesystem, but I do know that our System file has much less in it  
than a typical System file and that may confuse things.


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