Inbox Question: AV on Lotus Notes/Domino for Linux? ~ Ask The Admin

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Inbox Question: AV on Lotus Notes/Domino for Linux?

I got this question forwarded to me today and it was quite a good, reasonable question that I had to look into it to find out the answer because it was something I had never encountered to date.

Here's the question with the names not fully reported to protect the guilty..er....innocent:

We currently run Lotus Notes on a Windows server and are looking to move to a Linux server.

We now have Mcafee, but I do not believe they have a product for Linux that works with Lotus Notes.

Do you have any suggestions/recommendations for anti-virus for the Lotus Notes server only.

thank you

Joe


Well Joe, here's what I found out.

Started my search on Notes.net which is the first place to check for any questions regarding Notes/Domino...hell anything Lotus. Their forums are searchable and loaded full of nuggets of good info which has saved my bacon more than a few times.

Anyway, a quick browse through their forums shows very little information on Antivirus for Linux and Notes.

But...Google is your friend!

It turns out you do have options here.
There is:


One quick caveat. To date, there has never been a virus written to successfully exploit Lotus Notes/Domino. All viruses have been to exploit the underlying operating system. Now that doesn't mean that you do not need to have an AV product, I will say that you do.

But you also have other options.

Have you considered putting an anti-spam/virus/malware gateway in front of your Domino servers?


At my shop, we put this VMWare Virtual Appliance, ESVA as our gateway back in February. It uses a mixture of different technologies to filter nasties out of your email.

I put this in on our network in February, and to date not a single virus has made it to my Domino server!

Hope that answered your questions. And don't forget to check out our $300 give-a-way of a 2GB Crucial Memory Module!

TheSlothMan