Hi, guys ... Here is a mini-HOWTO describing my experience in installing F-PROT. Obtaining and Installing the Product -------------------------------------------- Go to "http://www.f-prot.com/download/getfplinfree.html". Select the download site and type of download; I selected the rpm install. Konqueror offered to install the package using "Package Manager", and I let it go ahead. The files wind up being installed under "/usr/local/f-prot". Configuring the Product ----------------------------- The product installs with two scripts: "f-prot.sh" and "check-updates.sh". "f-prot.sh" runs the virus scanner, while "check-updates.sh" checks for and downloads updated virus signature files (which all end in a ".DEF" extension; there are 3 of these). Basically, the product is ready to go at this point, so what I did from here on was some local tweaking. I wanted "f-prot.sh" and "check-updates.sh" to be run by cron at specific times each day. In particular, I wanted "f-prot.sh" to write a report file in my home directory, but the problem is that cron runs as root, so the report file would not be readable from my userid unless I got into superuser. So, what I did was write a "wrapper" script around "f-prot.sh" to chown the report file after it was created so that I could read it. I called this script "vscan", and it looks like this: #!/bin/sh # # This is a shell script to invoke the F-Prot OnDemand Scanner for Linux. # It creates a report file called "f-prot.rep" in the subdirectory of # "/home" corresponding to the specified userid. It then chowns this # report file so that the user can look at it without being superuser. # /usr/local/f-prot/f-prot / -report=/home/$1/f-prot.rep chown $1:users /home/$1/f-prot.rep I then did a "crontab -e" and created a pair of entries that look like this: 30 19 * * * /usr/local/f-prot/check-updates.sh -cron -quiet 30 07 * * * /usr/local/f-prot/vscan bill When "vscan" runs, $1 in the script is replaced by "bill", so the report gets written to (in this case) "/home/bill/f-prot.rep". So this way, at 7:30am every morning, f-prot is invoked to do the virus scan, and at 7:30pm every evening, I check to see if there are any new virus definition files to download. f-prot, when it runs, tells you the date and time of the virus signature files it's using, so you know indirectly that "check-updates.sh" is running. The only other thing I did was to define an icon on the KDE desktop to open the report file with "kwrite"; this way, all I have to do to check the virus scan log is to click on the icon. Regards, Bill Stephens Sungard Availability Services Phone: (215) 351-1099 Fax: (215) 451-4436