2 security questions

[pegasis]

I had 2 wild thoughts, and want to find out how silly these are;

1 is it possible/effective to build a separate computer to run virus scans on your main computer? what are the down sides?

this would free up CPU and memory for these tasks on the main computer

2. is it possible/effective to built a linux computer and use it as a firewall/router for your main computer? what are the down sides

this could hide the main computer, and make it appear as a linux box

 

[smakme7757]

1: That's a complete waste of power, money, resources. Your only choice would be to run manual scans constantly because the AV wouldn't be performing real time protection. That would put more load on your disks and make your PC slow as hell

Worst idea i have ever heard of 😛. Scanning incoming network traffic however would be a better way to go.

2. That is how all modern routers work. It's called NAT. You could create your own box and use (for example) Sophos Home edition which comes with active AV scanning of network traffic among other things.
It does require a user with semi-advanced network understanding to get it setup properly. The default is nothing is allowed.
http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-home-edition.aspx

 

[John Connor]

1)Check out Untangle.

2) Use Sandboxie.

3)Scan with Herdprotect.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

A lot of corporate antivirus like Trend Micro have just that, a server which monitors thin clients on the rest of the network, generally speaking though the bottleneck for virus scans is not memory or CPU but HDD access speed so even in this scenario the thin client still locally scans the computers, you can set it to background scan so it's not really noticeable or disruptive.

You can make good routers with linux in fact most of the more complex routers that you'd rack in a big business are using linux under the hood anyway even if they have a web interface. The main issue with doing a manual router is really security, you need to be exceedingly careful when rolling your own security you need to make sure you understand what types of traffic to block and allow and things like that, unless you're really knowledgeabout about security I'd advise against this and use an off the shelf product, which will likely be cheaper overall anyway.