Comodo Antivirus for Linux on Puppy 5.7.1

Antivirus, forensics, intrusion detection, cryptography, etc.
Post Reply
Message
Author
User avatar
prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

Comodo Antivirus for Linux on Puppy 5.7.1

#1 Post by prehistoric »

Recently, I took pity on yet another elderly couple who have lost control of their Windows 7 machine, and once again used free tools to clean out a minor infestation. That took about 20 minutes. The next 2 hours were spent undoing the damage they had done by downloading free software which claimed to fix such problems.

You need to know who you can trust.

While AVG is a legitimate antivirus company, their free software goes out of its way to make it hard to avoid paying them, simply to remove their outdated products from your machine. I do not recommend AVG.

I have also used Avira, which is free and decent, but takes considerable understanding.

I've generally had good luck using Comodo free utilities, and just installed their Comodo Antivirus for Linux under Precise Puppy 5.7.1 on a flash drive. This required use of their diagnostics to find that a kernel module was not loaded, and use of the command console to run the script that installed this, and restart the antivirus program. This was easy, and left me with a pocket installation I only need to update to use in the future. Running this under Puppy gives me other tools I can use, beyond Comodo's.

They also offer the Comodo Rescue Disk, which runs a version of Slitaz. I find Puppy more robust and convenient.

In the past I used Avast!, until the price of their rescue disk exceeded my budget. Maybe that situation has improved. Anyone have recent experience?

I've told others to buy the FixMe Stick, generally with good results. A few times I've had to show people how to get a machine to boot from the USB flash drive. Otherwise, this took care of problems without my intervention.

The Comodo free tools come in several formats. I was able to install from a .deb package for 12.04 which works on Precise Puppy 5.7.1. There is also a Windows exe file you can run without installing, if you can get the system to the point of mounting and opening a USB drive. This is handy if you want to do a quick check without shutting down a Windoze installation.

At present I have one system on the stick for running development or Skype from sfs files I can load on-the-fly. I would like to have that .deb file repackaged as an sfs file so I could only load it as desired, without taking up space in a save file. This would give me a small and flexible system which I could use on a variety of machines with limited memory.

Anyone have tips on how to do this without starting a major project?

Sylvander
Posts: 4416
Joined: Mon 15 Dec 2008, 11:06
Location: West Lothian, Scotland, UK

#2 Post by Sylvander »

I have 32-bit Slacko-5.7.0 pae Frugal Install on a 4GB Flash Drive, connected to 64-bit desktop PC.

Booted that and installed 32-bit cav-linux_1.1.268025-1_i386.deb.
At the end of the install it was reported that there was/is no entry in the menu system.
There are now lots of Comodo cav files on my system, including /etc/xdg/autostart/cav.desktop.

How should I run this?
What I want is an on-demand scanner.

User avatar
prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

#3 Post by prehistoric »

Now go to /usr/share/applications where you should see a number of Comodo desktop links. Copy these to your pinboard/desktop and edit out the overly long labels.

You should then be able to run them by simply clicking on them. There should be other instructions out there on the forum for adding menu entries when you have the links needed available in those desktop items. This is just a simple approach which did not require much effort on my part.

I would run the Comodo diagnostics application first to check that it has everything needed. That is how I found the missing kernel module. The instructions on loading that and restarting the application were displayed when I ran the diagnostics.

I haven't worried about shutting down the antivirus process, since I only use this version of the system when I am scanning a Windows machine. You may want to stop it when you want to get rid of the overhead in a Puppy system that stays up.

User avatar
prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

#4 Post by prehistoric »

Still working to make this easier to use. I keep getting a problem report caused by a missing kernel module redirfs.ko, but this does not seem to prevent me from starting and running the antivirus scanner. What is going on?

It tells me to run /opt/COMODO/post_install.sh to fix this, but it looks to me like this is failing to compile a missing kernel module because the devx sfs is not loaded and there is no kernel source to compile.

This is getting into deeper water than I like to explore in my present debilitated condition.

For my own purposes the current setup plus workaround is adequate, as I only use the Comodo virus scanner on Windoze machines, which I don't run at home. A minute fixing the problem before I run a scan likely to take 20 minutes or so has not been a serious drawback.

If someone more used to compiling kernels recently wants to compile this module it would eliminate one of the irritations in using this tool. Since Puppy's file system structure is not exactly a trivial departure from common Linux, I don't promise there won't be other surprises in this process.

Added: just found this on the Comodo site. Kinta has posted a stable version for early kernels. I'm running a PAE system with a later kernel. Most recent Ubuntu kernels don't seem to need this fix.

Sylvander
Posts: 4416
Joined: Mon 15 Dec 2008, 11:06
Location: West Lothian, Scotland, UK

#5 Post by Sylvander »

Won't be working on this right now; whole house plastering + painting + re-carpeting in progress.
Will get back to this A.S.A.P. :D

User avatar
prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

#6 Post by prehistoric »

After more experiments I have succeeded in running a scan on several machines, but always with the work-around mentioned above. I seem to be missing the redirfs.ko and avflt.ko kernel modules.

What kinta supplies above are source files for early kernels. I've gone so far as to install the devx and kernel source sfs files for Precise 5.7.1 by Stemsee, but I'm still having problems building those kernel modules using the kinta-supplied make file. I'm not keen on putting those sources in the main source tree and doing a "make all" for drivers.

The latest problem is that the script is looking for build directories which are not there. This may be a simple matter for people who have compiled kernels regularly, but I am out of touch.

Post Reply