jln@acns.nwu.edu (John Norstad) (07/12/90)
I've received lots of questions about the new virus protection INIT in Disinfectant 2.0. People want to know whether it's compatible with Gatekeeper and/or the various commercial protection INITs, whether they should use it together with these other INITs or in place of them, etc. I didn't do a good enough job discussing these issues in the manual. I'll try to clarify them here. First, the Disinfectant INIT detects and blocks ALL of the currently known Mac virus families (Scores, nVIR, INIT 29, ANTI, MacMag, WDEF, ZUC, MDEF, and Frankie). It DOES NOT detect or block ANY possible unknown viruses. I don't know of any conflicts between the Disinfectant INIT and Vaccine, GateKeeper, GateKeeper AID, Eradicat'Em, SAM Intercept, Rival, the Virex INIT, etc. I haven't done exhaustive testing, however, and I couldn't guarantee 100% compatibility even if I had. There is no good reason to use more than one protection INIT, with one exception. The exception is that if you use GateKeeper, you should also use either GateKeeper Aid or Eradicat'Em. GateKeeper catches all the known viruses EXCEPT for WDEF, while the other two INITs handle WDEF. With this notable exception, I recommend that you pick a single protection INIT and use just that one. Using more than one does not usually increase the protection at all, it's just asking for compatibility problems and wasting memory. I no longer recommend that you use Vaccine. Vaccine is an admirable piece of work which did its job well for a long time, but it's no longer sufficient. It is showing its age - it's not supported, and it does not catch several of the newer viruses (WDEF in particular). I recommend that you use GateKeeper (together with GateKeeper AID or Eradicat'Em), OR use the Disinfectant INIT, OR use one of the commercial INITs. Deciding which INIT to use is an issue of free vs. commercial and simplicity vs. power. The Disinfectant 2.0 manual discusses the simplicity vs. power issue in more detail (see the section titled "Protection"). Hope this helps. John Norstad Academic Computing and Network Services Northwestern University jln@acns.nwu.edu