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Subject: RE: Best AVS to use with cygwin
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:33:56 -0400
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From: "Williams, Gerald S (Jerry)" <Jerry DOT Williams AT lsi DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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As a long-time Cygwin user, I can say that I would very much
appreciate as much information as possible about "known good"
and "known bad" antivirus, firewall, and anti-spyware tools or
combinations thereof, including what Windows version was used,
what special steps needed to be taken, etc.

The problem with the BLODA is that any tool that periodically
updates itself can become dodgy, and similarly can fix itself
in the future. And even if it's still dodgy, I'd want to know
what to look out for. For example, I don't necessarily care
that McAfee was known to be dodgy at one point. We used it at
work (so I didn't have a choice anyway), although I haven't
noticed problems with Cygwin because of it. Or at least if I
have had any problems, I didn't know enough to know whether
McAfee was the culprit.

For home use, I have been able to find most of the popular
all-in-one packages for free with various rebates: CA, Norton,
McAfee, Kaspersky, Panda, etc. And I have boxes of them just
waiting to be tried out. :-)

But you know what? I don't really want to be spending my
time doing this. I'll gladly try one or two out, but not
all. And given the choice, I'd rather use something that's
pay-once-and-your-done (or better yet free-as-in-free) than
something that's free-for-a-limited-time.

One of the reasons I use Cygwin is because I don't want to
put up with that type of Windows nonsense. Stuff should just
work, right?

So from my POV, the more information, the better. It's less
that I have to discover on my own.

-----

Taking my own advice, here are my experiences:

(For anti-spyware, I run Spybot and Ad-Aware, in addition to
whatever is in the suite I happen to be using. I'll also run
clam periodically, though not nearly as often as I should.)

I used a corporate McAfee Antivirus subscription for years,
with good success. That's not to say that I've never had any
problems with Cygwin programs (e.g., I have at times seen an
"out of resources" type error), although I haven't had any
particular reason to blame McAfee for it.

We've switched to Symantec AntiVirus in the last year or two,
and so far I haven't had any problems with it, either.

We have a hardware firewall that our IT folks like to rely
upon. I've also used ZoneAlarm with good success.

At home, I've used both ZoneAlarm and Sygate (which I believe
was now acquired by Symantec). The latter seems easier for a
novice to install/maintain (and is what I'm currently using),
although both have worked well for me. With ZoneAlarm, I had
to spend more time approving Cygwin applications to run, from
what I remember.

I've used multiple versions of McAfee's all-in-one product.
The 60-day to 1-year subscriptions that came prepackaged with
my new PCs seemed more sluggish and CPU-intensive than the
boxed versions I tried. I'm not sure why. Currently I have
one system using only McAfee Antivirus along with Sygate (and
Spybot/Ad-Aware/etc.) and this has been pretty stable, though
it's now one of my less-used systems.

One product I would recommend against is CA Internet Security
Suite. My laptop came with a free all-in-one trial (I think
it was Norton Internet Security), and although I never noticed
any problems with Cygwin, for some reason I didn't feel very
happy with the product. I installed a free-with-rebate version
of CA Internet Security, and while I haven't noticed any
Cygwin problems, it seems to interfere everywhere else. It's
privacy feature will even cause the PC to blue screen if you
open up a particular web page (in any browser)--and I'm not
talking about one of *those* web pages: this one's on a Boy
Scout site! Its firewall also is way to intrusive with web
surfing, messing up many legitimate sites.

All of my experiences are currently with Windows XP, although
all but one of the systems started with Windows 2000. I just
bought two new computers with Vista (one of which may actually
remain a Vista machine), so I'm in the market for a new set of
internet security solutions.

-Jerry

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