I think the advice to start with a linux server and run samba to serve Windows clients is the right approach. It lets your staff keep what they know how to use, while providing you substantial protection against the kind of problems you've just been wrestling with. Several points I'd like to recommend: 1.) Insist that your clients write their data files on the linux server. Do not allow, or strongly discourage writing files on C:>, in other words; 2.) Get several large hard disks--as needed--on the server, and keep a dd image of each workstation's C:> drive on the server. That way, should your clients ever become infected again, you simply need to dd the image back from the server to recreate a pristine Win client--and you lose no data because that's all on the server. In my ejxperience, it's far easier, and far quicker to simply restore a pristine computer than to sleuth around file by infected file. But the key to this strategy is the data. If that's on the workstation, you won't want to blow it away. That's why point 1 is so critical. The time to restore a workstation will be quite short, actually. If you do it over the net from the server, it will depend on your net connection speed. If you get some kind of hich-capacity media--like a scsi orb drive, for example, and the local cards to support this, you could go around to each workstation and restore more quickly. I think you could easily put back five client systems within an hour. I have been using this very strategy recently in building a new Win 98 installation. I back it up, from time to time, using dd. Then, if my next software installas run me into trouble, i.e., start negatively affecting already installed software, I just step back using my dd image and take a different course toward my goal. This strategy gets me robust Win installations in the long run, that are relatively impervious to the kinds of problems you're experiencing, because they're not intended to be permanent. On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Rafael Skodlar wrote: > On Wed, Sep 19, 2001 at 01:51:36AM -0400, John J. Boyer wrote: > > Hello, > > As it happens, we just got infected with the new worm. It propagated over > > our network to four different computers. I've been steadily getting sick of > > Windows, so now i'm wondering how hard it would be to convert a five-person > > office from Windows to Linux. We must also be able to use DOS in native > > mode. > > This is not an easy question because we don't know what kind of > applications you need to run the business. I would start with a server and > Samba to have stable environment for printing, email, backup, or anything > else. > > The most difficult part is the applications. Depending on what you do it > might be difficult to find the right software for the right price. For > general office work StarOffice is good enough and it will be even better > when 6.0 comes out. There are other similar office tools coming out in the > near future. > > Another important issue is learning new tools to do the job. For example, > learning Gimp for graphics manipulation, etc. > > You would need to install dosemu to run DOS programs in Linux. That is > critical since there is no guarantee it will work. There are still some > programs that might not work. Alternative would be VMWARE to run windows > programs inside Linux. The good thing about it is that you can roll back > to before the virus attack I believe. > > > Thanks. > > John > > > > Computers to Help People, Inc. > > http://www.chpi.org > > 825 East Johnson; Madison, WI 53703 > > > > -- > Rafael > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Blinux-list@redhat.com > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list >