J
Jeffrey H. Coffield
My current "PC" is an Alpha running OpenVMS. Alpha system, the previousRoedy said:what are you referring to?
Vax systems the newer Itanium running OpenVMS do not allow user programs
to access system memory as they all implement virtual memory in
hardware. A virus has to be able to overwrite some part of the system to
infect it. There simply is no user mode address that corresponds to
system memory. There is no such thing as a buffer overflow allowing
access to memory not allocated to your user process. You would have to
write a device driver and have the system manager install it to gain
access to system memory. It is true that this hardware costs more that a
PC does, but when you factor in the time spent on trying to patch the
problem after the fact with anti virus software that is rendered
obsolete in a matter of hours, crashes etc., they are far cheaper.
System management on 14 systems that have a total of about 30,000
registered users takes me about 1-2 hours/month.
My point is that if a system is designed correctly from the start,
viruses etc. are not a problem. Included is the only OpenVMS virus
scanner (complete source code) I have ever seen.
$ WRITE SYS$OUTPUT "Starting OpenVMS virus scan..."
$ WAIT 00:01:00
$ WRITE SYS$OUTPUT "Virus scan complete. No viruses detected"