Marco Luthe Online!

Today, I was just thinking… “How can I make Firefox virus scan the files I download?” I have always been using Avira’s free software AntiVir Personal, which I think is pretty good. So far, I have never had neither a virus nor a worm on my computer (thank God!).

Unfortunately, I had problems integrating the avscan.exe (as described here) into the Download Status Bar extension for Firefox: I always got a “Profile could not be found” error from AntiVir.

A quick Google search took me to an article on netzwelt.de which recommends using a free virus scanner called ClamWin (BTW: the article is from 2006).

The solution was found:

Just let the Download Status Bar know where your clamwin.exe is at and put the parameters to –mode=scanner –path=%1 –close.

Works like a charm.

The only question is: how good is ClamWin?

Well, I still have the AntiVir Guard running, right?

[Update from 2009-12-01]

If you want to update the virus database every time you start your Windows XP, put a link to “freshclam.exe” (found within the “bin”-directory) in your autostart folder.

Before it’ll work, you’ll have to create a file called “freshclam.conf” in the same directory as the .exe-file which could have the following contents:

UpdateLogFile freshclam.log
DNSDatabaseInfo current.cvd.clamav.net
DatabaseMirror db.de.clamav.net
DatabaseMirror database.clamav.net

Note the “de” in the third line – it stands for Germany [de]. You should put in your country code there.

For more configuration options, see http://linux.die.net/man/5/freshclam.conf.