Policy Best Practices › Local Alert Manager for Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X Systems

Local Alert Manager for Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X Systems

Under Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X, you may use the Local Alert Manager setting to send notification information to a shell script that you write yourself. The script then takes any action you indicate, such as sending an email to a specified address when eTrust Antivirus detects a virus.

Use the script InoSetAlert to specify the name of the script (using an absolute path) that you want to run when an alert is generated. You must also use absolute paths when referencing any files in the script itself, unless the code is explicit about changing to a particular directory.

For example, the following command causes /home/myfiles/myscript to be used as the alert script:

InoSetAlert /home/myfiles/myscript

The script must be executable. If it is not, use the chmod command to change the file mode. For example:

chmod +x /home/myfiles/myscript

The following command turns the feature off:

InoSetAlert -delete

Under Mac OS X, you can also indicate an alert script to be run in the eTrust Antivirus Preference Options panel that can be run from System Preferences panel.

eTrust Antivirus sends specific information, which it receives as standard script arguments such as $1, $2, and so on, to the script. These arguments, in order, are:

1. Time of the event (as a string, such as "10:15:20 AM 22-Jan-2001").
2. Code number for the event. For example, the code number for a virus detection by Realtime Protection is 26.
3. The severity of the event: 1=Information, 2=Warning, 3=Error.
4. The name of the node on which the event occurred.
5. The text of the message generated by eTrust Antivirus.