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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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