MacHack 1995/MacHack 1995.toast/Presentations/Presentations ’90/John Norstad/Disinfectant 2.0b2/Disinfectant 2.0b2.rsrc/STR#_217.txt

Text File | 1990-06-12 | 8KB | 277 lines

(reformat) all of your remaining suspect backup floppies.

(hard drives and floppies), then do a new full backup, and finally erase

infected, we recommend that you first disinfect all of your other disks

not recognized by Disinfectant. If you suspect that your backups are

These applications usually write their backups in a special format which is

produced by most of the various hard disk backup utility applications.

• Disinfectant cannot be used to check the backup floppy disks or tapes



them and check the unpacked files.

want to make certain they do not contain infections, you must unpack

converted or archived by some similar utility. If you have such files and

have been compressed with PackIt, or if they have been compressed,

archive, if they have been converted to a text file with BinHex, if they

• Disinfectant will not detect infected files if they are part of a StuffIt



time. Please be patient.

“Please wait” while it does this preloading, which can take quite some

shuffling” on these systems. Disinfectant displays a dialog telling you to

Disinfectant needs to do scanning from the disk. This minimizes “floppy

When you eject the virus tools disk, we preload the information



to insert the disks you wish to scan or disinfect.

Click on the Eject button to eject your startup disk. Use the floppy drive

floppy drive. Start up and run Disinfectant from your virus tools disk.

• Disinfectant may be used on Macs with no hard drive and only a single



person simultaneously.

• Disinfectant may be installed on a server and used by more than one



advice on what to do if you get an error message.

Messages” for detailed information on what each message means and for

message is issued. Consult the section in this document titled “Error

for Disinfectant to properly repair such a file, an appropriate error

special cases, Disinfectant is able to repair the files. If it is impossible

possible for a file to be infected by more than one virus. In most of these

be run at all and sometimes viruses only partially infect files. It is also

• Viruses sometimes damage applications in such a way that they cannot



scan.

problem is not serious. It is annoying, but it does not interfere with the

and flashes an alert intermittently while scanning with Disinfectant. The

When scanning over TOPS, we have noticed that TOPS sometimes beeps



servers.

this special version of the virus tools floppy only for scanning AppleShare

contains a copy of Apple’s “Desktop Manager” startup document file. Use

can avoid this problem by creating a special virus tools floppy that

hang during the process of building its version of the Desktop file.) You

the server using your regular virus tools disk (the Finder will bomb or

contains a large number of applications, it may not be possible to start up

kind of “Desktop” file than is used on regular disks. If the server disk

One problem with AppleShare server disks is that they use a different



AppleShare server disk.

over a network. This is also the only way to scan the Server folder on an

problems. Scanning a local disk is also much faster than scanning a disk

to avoid file busy errors, insufficient privileges errors, and other

using the Mac to which they are directly connected. This is the only way

that you remove servers and shared disks from production and scan them

disks on a TOPS network. For the best results, however, we recommend

• Disinfectant may be used to scan AppleShare server disks and remote



enough memory to load them and check them for viruses.

applications use surprisingly large resources and Disinfectant must have

partition. The large memory partition is desirable because some

the preferred partition and you will have to run with the smaller minimum

Macintoshes running MultiFinder, there is not enough memory to allocate

700K and a “minimum” memory partition of 400K. On 1 megabyte

• Under MultiFinder, Disinfectant has a “preferred” memory partition of



be infections and will not try to delete them on disinfection runs.

does, however, recognize these “inhibitors.” It does not consider them to

in an attempt to prevent future infections. Disinfectant does not do this. It

• Some other anti-viral tools add special “inhibitor resources” to files



to make them easy to find in the report.

error messages and messages reporting infected files begin with “###,”

summary at the end of the report tells you if there were any errors. All

and errors on attempts to disinfect “busy” and “damaged” files. The

reports disk full errors on attempts to save files, out of memory errors,

• Disinfectant tries to perform careful error checking. E.g., it properly



in HFS format.

400K floppies are usually in MFS format, whereas other disks are usually

• Disinfectant can scan and repair both MFS and HFS disks. Single-sided



preferences window to specify which applications own saved text files.

window and you must type four character creator types in the

You must use the Drive and Eject buttons to select a disk in the main

do not support popup menus and, in this case, Disinfectant disables them.

which applications should own saved text files). Systems earlier than 4.1

method for selecting a disk) and in the preferences window (to select

• Disinfectant uses popup menus in the main window (as an alternate



options” section of the preferences window is inactive (grayed out).

Disinfectant does not attempt to use it. In this case, the “Notification

Systems prior to 6.0 do not support the Notification Manager and

is discovered or if Disinfectant requires attention for some other reason.

6.0 and later, the Notification Manager is used to notify you if an infection

• Disinfectant can scan in the background under MultiFinder. With System



• Disinfectant is 32-bit clean and may be run under AUX.



memory, System 3.2 or later, and the hierarchical file system (“HFS”).

• Disinfectant can be run on any model of Macintosh with at least 512K of



help facility, admire the about box, etc.

help window, adjust options in the preferences window, use the online

another scan while a scan is in progress. You can read the document in the

continue in the background. You can do just about anything except start

and switch to some other application under MultiFinder and the scan will

and you can use MultiFinder application switching. You can start a scan

multiple windows open at the same time, you can use desk accessories,

• Disinfectant is “modeless.” This means several things. You can have



management, as presented in their Human Interface Note number 6.

For example, we religiously adhere to Apple’s rules for window

tried to follow Apple’s human interface guidelines as closely as possible.

possible to use so that even novices will be able to utilize it. We have

• One of our major design goals was to make Disinfectant as simple as



this document and take it seriously.

cases we do not handle properly. Read the disclaimer at the beginning of

files is quite complicated and it is highly likely that there are some rare

• It is very important to realize that detecting and repairing infected



technical topics, and other miscellaneous items.

In this section we discuss various advanced features of Disinfectant,








åSpecial Features



2




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