Busy weekend

Yesterday I made a site visit to one of my clients to install antivirus software on their file and mailservers. The fileserver runs W2K3 SBS Edition; I loaded AVG Fileserver Edtion on it. It's set to do daily updates and scans. I went with AVG based on my experience with their free, non-commercial-use version. I've found it to provide good protection on several Windows boxes and it cause much less of a performance hit than Norton Antivirus, which has grown into a bloated pig.

The mail server, which runs SuSE and CommuniGate Pro, got ClamAV installed. For integration with CGP I'm using cgpav. Since I didn't remember to bring my SuSE 9.0 discs I had to grab the RPMs from ftp.suse.com. By doing so I wasn't able to rely on YaST's dependency checking, so I first made a detour through dependency hell and had to also grab gmp to proivde a required library. Freshclam checks for updates every couple of hours, then installs them if available. Since a lot of spam is the product of various worms, I'm hoping that this will cut down on the amount of junk mail they get.

While onsite I also looked at a couple of their PCs. They use Outlook Express (blecch) and Norton Antispam. The latter is causing an odd error the first time OE is started. If they try to right-click on an email to view it's properties, or to move an email to a different folder, OE craps out, but only the first time you do this after booting the PC. If you go into the details provided by Dr. Watson, you see that a DLL being called by Norton Antispam is the culprit. I'm doing another site visit in March and we've already discussed giving Thunderbird a try. We'll also get Spybot Search & Destroy on all their PCs. They are rightly concerned about malware and I'm wondering if a proxy server setup to filter out a lot of the junk wouldn't be a bad idea.

Last night my MIL was kind enough to babysit while Judith and I went out to dinner. She was in the mood for steak so we went to Outback. Unfortunately, the wait was on the order of 75 - 80 minutes. Their steak isn't worth that long of a wait, so we wound up at Ichiban, a local Japanese restaurant that's pretty good. Judith was able to get her steak and I got shrimp and scallops.

Today I watched Amanda in the morning while Judith went out with Alexandra to the supermarket. After they got back I went out to Lowe's, back to the supermarket for stuff Judith forgot, and then the bank. One of the drawers in our kitchen was falling apart so I needed to buy supplies at Lowe's. While there I picked up a Black & Decker jigsaw for all of $25. It came in handy cutting the wood which I used to replace the bottom of the drawer. Yeah, it's a cheap saw but for my light occasional use, I don't need Porter Cable.