quick ?

[AnAl0gSaMuRaI]

my mom works at a school, and she was asking me how to tweak some stuff on her computer, such as disabling the proxy server known as "BESS", and she told me that her computer doesn't have any anti-virus software installed. she asked the so-called "computer expert" about whether or not she should have this stuff on her computer, and he proceeded to yell at her. he claimed the server the shcool uses has anti-virus software on it, thus any computers on the network won't get viruses... is this true? it doesn't seem like it would work like that

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[dangottfried]

First, BESS is internet filtering software. It is actually one of the better schemes for filtering as it does not arbitrarily filter based upon a keyword. Instead , there are catagories of sites that are filtered based upon human review of their content. Not a perfect scheme but better than what happens with keyword based filters.

In answer to your question about virus protection. A virus can still be introduced to an individual computer on the network through a file on a floppy disk. Presumably, when your network administrator says the server based virus protection protects all the computers, he is correct because he has set the software to detect any file containing a virus that is opened or copied to a local machine. However, if he has not set the anti-virus software to detect automatically, it is possible to get a virus on a local machine despite having anti-virus protection on the server.
Originally posted by AnAl0gSaMuRaI:
my mom works at a school, and she was asking me how to tweak some stuff on her computer, such as disabling the proxy server known as "BESS", and she told me that her computer doesn't have any anti-virus software installed. she asked the so-called "computer expert" about whether or not she should have this stuff on her computer, and he proceeded to yell at her. he claimed the server the shcool uses has anti-virus software on it, thus any computers on the network won't get viruses... is this true? it doesn't seem like it would work like that

[jdblitz]

any file dloaded that doesnt have an active scan virus checker on the MACHINE doing the downloading can download a virus. any compressed files that pass as a whole could carry a file carrying a trojan horse once it is expanded, tell mom to be especially careful with .zip .rar etc. but, as a rule, I dont d'load anything onto my work laptop less it comes from a website like zdnet or msoft or speedguide, etc.

[AnAl0gSaMuRaI]

ah, thanks for the help

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[dmsmed]

If I'm not mistaken even if you find a way around BESS, the IT guy can still see where your mom has been surfing because everything has to pass through the server. One of the guys in my Cisco class is an IT guy for the City of Chicago, he mentioned he could surf where ever he wanted but he would have to empty the cache on the server so no one would know where he had been. I'm thinking this may be the case with mom. Is this true does everything have to go through the server and will it reside on it afterword?