[sophos-ide-update-announce] Announcing 'sophos-ide-update' V1.0

[Mark Martinec]

This is to announce the availability of a Perl program 'sophos-ide-update'
to update virus signature .ide files from the Sophos web server.

It is freely available (GPL license) at:

  http://www.ijs.si/software/sophos-ide-update/


This is the sequence of steps the program goes through:

- creates a temporary directory as a working area and as a locking mechanism;
- sends a conditional HTTP GET request to a Sophos' web server
  requesting <x>_ides.zip file if and only if it is younger
  than the local copy;
- downloads the new <x>_ides.zip file (if younger) into a temporary directory
  and unpacks it flatly, ignoring paths and members with weird names;
- compares the current and new .ide files, decides what changes need
  to be made, carefully updates the 'sav' directory and produces a report;
- if Sophie daemon is detected and any changes were made, send it a SIGHUP;
- writes a terse report to a log file (if defined) and mails it (or a
  possible problem report) to an administrator (if specified);
- removes the temporary directory;
- exits with code 0 (success) if:
   * everything went smoothly,
   * or, there was a problem, but a problem report was successfully mailed;
   * or, regardless of any problems, a '-s' command line option was set
     (useful to prevent mail bounces if the program is run from a MTA pipe);
  otherwise exit code is nonzero;

The program can be run periodically (e.g. from cron), or/and triggered
on-demand by some other means, e.g. manually or run by MTA using an alias
that pipes Sophos IDE update announcements to it.

P.S.
  I'm sending this announcement to mailing lists:
     [AMaViS-user]  <amavis-user@lists.sourceforge.net>, and
     [vtools]       <vtools@vanja.com>
  with hope the information will be welcome and perhaps of interest to readers.

Mark

-- 
  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  !!  Mark Martinec (system manager)     tel  +386 1 4773-575 !!
  !!  J. Stefan Institute, Jamova 39     fax  +386 1 2519-385 !!
  !!  SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia        mark.martinec@ijs.si !!
  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! http://www.ijs.si/people/mark/ !!!!