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- Sender: executor-request@ictv.com
- Precedence: bulk
- Date: Wed, 29 Jan 92 18:22:51 MST
- From: iclone!ctm@unmvax.cs.unm.edu (Clifford T. Matthews)
-
- 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.
-
-
- Yes, but I prefer mac.archive.umich.edu instead because they have very
- good index and descriptions there. And if you are from Europe then
- there is Sumex mirror site at Sweden (lth.se) and then nic.funet.fi
- where I keep my own Mac archives.
-
-
- >> 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).
-
- Not completely true. ".bin" files are MacBinary files. At least that
- is how I keep them. ".hqx" are normal ASCII files like UUENCODED
- files. ".cpt", ".sit" and ".sea" files are MacBinary files.
-
- >> 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.
-
- Disinfectant is a normal application that scans and removes viruses.
-
- -harri-
-
-