Security on Linux: Securing your Desktop

PCQLinux 2004 has been created to provide you security at desktop level. We have added an anti-virus software called ClamAV and a GUI-based personal firewall for desktops PCs, called firestarter. Both help you fight against viruses and hackers. For securing your PCQLinux 2004 desktop, during installation you need to select Security under PCQLinux Specials in the package-selection list. This will automatically install security tools such as firestarter, clamav and amavis. After the installation you are ready to use these security tools.

ClamAV



ClamAV is a command-line, open-source anti-virus toolkit for Unix that can detect infected files in the machine and remove them. To run a check for viruses on your machine, open a terminal window and run the command: #clamscan Path is required to scan files in a particular location. You can set it to daemon mode also, so that whenever the machine comes into contact with a new virus, the daemon can inform the user. To run ClamAV in daemon mode, open a terminal window and run ‘setup’ from the hash prompt. This will open a text-mode utility. Select ‘System Services’, which will show you the list of all the services installed on your Linux machine. Select ‘clamd’ by pressing the space bar from your keyboard and then the Ok button. This will run this software in the daemon mode, when you restart the machine. To start and stop Clam manually, fire the following command from the terminal window.

# service clamd start



# service clamd stop







You can download the latest virus-definition updates by issuing the following from a terminal window.






# freshclam

This will download the latest definition files from its site and incorporate it with the anti-virus software. It is highly recommended that you keep updating your virus definitions as new viruses emerge everyday.

Firestarter



Firestarter is a GUI program for configuring a personal firewall using IPTables, with basic rule sets. By default, no firewall rules are set. Rules have to be created in the firewall. To run firestarter, click on the ‘K’ start menu of KDE 3.2 and then click on System> firestarter. You will get a wizard to configure it. The wizard is very simple to understand, and you do not need to know about IPTables. But, if you do face any problem in configuring the software, read the article GUI for IPTables in the December 2003 issue of PCQuest or visit

www.pcquest.com/content/search/showarticle.asp?arid=52052&way=search.

Sanjay Majumder