Q. Is OdeiaVir a virus scanner?

A. No, it's a wrapper that allows you to call a virus scanner of your
   choice to scan incoming mail messages. You have to have a valid license
   for the antivirus if you want to be legally able to use OdeiaVir.


Q. What's this "ripMIME" you call from OdeiaVir?

A. It's an utility that slices an e-mail message into body, headers, and
   attachments. OdeiaVir calls the virus scanner on the temporary directory
   ripMIME creates.


Q. Doesn't it scan outgoing mail?

A. The short answer is no. The long answer is, I MIGHT work on it in the
   future. You'll agree that protecting your own users is more important
   than protecting someone else's. And it saves CPU too -- no scanning
   messages that will be bounced, spam-filtered etc. Also, if you are a
   service provider, you can set up "premium" accounts, with users paying
   $$$ for virus protection.


Q. Why "OdeiaVir"? What does it mean?

A. Before I decided to create OdeiaVir, I was trying to get AMaViS
   (http://www.amavis.org/) to work. "Ama" in Portuguese means "loves",
   so "amavis" sounded dangerously close to "loves viruses". "Hates" in
   Portuguese is "odeia", so...


Q. Ah, you're Portuguese?

A. Close. I'm Brazilian.


Q. I upgraded OdeiaVir and now it doesn't work. I use uvscan.

A. From 0.3.2 on, OdeiaVir makes use of the --mime command-line switch of
   uvscan, which wasn't present in versions of uvscan prior to 4.16.
   Upgrade uvscan.


Q. I upgraded OdeiaVir and now nobody gets virus warnings, but infected
   messages seem to be blocked.

A. From 0.5.0 on, OdeiaVir requires a functioning sendmail executable.
   Qmail provides one. See the qmail documentation.


Q. I want to send you some cool changes I made to OdeiaVir.

A. Be sure to have an unchanged source directory somewhere. Let's say you
   have an unchanged OdeiaVir at /usr/src/odeiavir-0.2.1 and your changed
   version is at /usr/src/odeiavir-0.2.1-mychanges. Then run the following
   command: (it is one line only, from the "diff" to the ">mypatch.patch")

      diff -ru /usr/src/odeiavir-0.2.1 /usr/src/odeiavir-0.2.1-mychanges
      >mypatch.patch

   Then send me the mypatch.patch file, along with a description of the
   changes.


Q. OdeiaVir doesn't support antivirus XYZ. You, therefore, suck.

A. Take a look at the AVDefs structure in odeiavir.c and start working on
   your antivirus. Save its output to a txt file, study its docs to see
   what's the return code for virus found, and how the virus name appears
   in the output. If you successfuly get it to work, send me a patch (see
   previous question). If you're stumped, mail me an URL for the antivirus
   and maybe, just MAYBE, I'll include support for it in the official
   OdeiaVir distribution.


Q. What? No Norton?

A. There is no Unix version for Norton Antivirus that I know of. Yo,
   Symantec, are you hearing?


Q. OdeiaVir doesn't seem to be able to send a warning message to the
   sender/receiver of an infected message.

A. Some qmail setups interfere with the automatic detection of sender or
   receiver addresses. Take a look at the -ns, -nr, -r, -w, and -f
   command-line switches in the README.


Q. My server is not an Intel machine. Am I out of luck?

A. Not exactly. Makers of proprietary software (like the antiviruses
   OdeiaVir depends on) have the annoying habit of only compiling their
   products for i386. When this FAQ was written, two of the supported
   antivirus programs (McAfee VirusScan and Sophos Anti-Virus) have 
   support for non-Intel machines (and other kinds of Intel Unices).


Q. Why is configuration for ScannerDaemon different than for other scanners?

A. ScannerDaemon is not an executable program that gets called via
   system(), but rather a daemon, as its name says. OdeiaVir makes a TCP
   connection to it and sends the name of the file(s) to scan. The
   advantage of such a setup is that the ever-growing table of virus
   signatures is read from disk only once, at startup. The bad news is
   that ScannerDaemon is (at the time of this writing) in a very
   preliminary stage. Make regular visits to http://www.openantivirus.org.


Q. Doesn't Kaspersky (http://www.kaspersky.com) have a "daemon mode" too?

A. Yes, but when I tried to put it to work, I was in a bad day. Maybe I'll
   try again when I'm in a less irritable mood. If you are a C programmer,
   consider yourself invited to contribute this feature to OdeiaVir. You can
   use Kaspersky as a "normal" (command-line) antivirus from OdeiaVir.


Q. I wanna OdeiaVir with Sendmail! I wanna! I wanna! Waaaaahhhh!!!

A. Sendmail support will be here Real Soon Now (TM). Meanwhile, you can take
   a look at Paul L. Daniels's Inflex (http://www.pldaniels.com/inflex/)
