Virus Scanning Station for IT Company

ssjaken

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Feb 5, 2010
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Hey everyone, hopefully this is the right place for this kind of question.

I work for a local computer service shop. We have a computer that is currently used for backing up data for customers and doing virus scans on machines that wont boot because of the virus.

As you can imagine inviting viruses to the machine that has client backups is problematic. So i am instituting a virus scanning machine.

We have a ton of "dead" systems that we can frankenstein together to make a machine that will just scan drives.

I was thinking running knoppix or some flavor of linux on the machine, but im not familiar with virus scanning software on linux that will look for windows style viruses.

Also we need the system to have hot swappable capabilities, having to reboot the machine every time to add a new drive would slow down (and having to restart scans because of a reboot would all slow down the overall process).

We currently have this in the 3.5" bay on our backup machine
vVZ7R.jpg


but no one knows what its called or where to get another because it was bought before i started working and the paper work wasnt saved.

it uses a female to female 20 pin sata cable (power and data on one cable). This does hot swap drives, but sometimes it blue screens if the disk has corruption.

other than that im/we are 100% open to suggestions on what would make a good bulk hot swappable virus scanning system that can also do disk repair (ala chkdsk or S.M.A.R.T scanning)

thanks!
 
What you should look for is a "hot swap sata drive bay". Such as this: http://aphnetworks.com/reviews/istarusa_t5f_ss/

Or: http://www.amazon.com/SUPERMICRO-Hot-Swap-Mobile-System-Cabinet/dp/B00009ILU0

Take a look at stores selling Server related stuff they usually have things like what your looking for. In any case, what I linked to should work the same for what your trying to do.

As for Virus scanning on Linux, best bet would be AVG for Linux: http://free.avg.com/ww-en/download?prd=afl
As for Linux distro, I recommend openSUSE and Fedora for business/cooperate/business use. Imo, Ubuntu is over rated. Or go FreeBSD. (Note: BSD distros and Linux distros ARE different)

Depending on the system specs, you may be better off with running a VM on top of Windows.
 

ssjaken

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Feb 5, 2010
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18,510
oh sorry, forgot to mention. we get alot of IDE disks too from older systems, we have usb to IDE connectors and external molex power supplies for those, but are there any other better solutions?

i know they have cages that you can put laptop drives in ( 2.5") so that they fit in the standard desktop slots, would those work for a hot swap bay?