Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Alternative Operating Systems => Topic started by: TheMud on December 14, 2007, 10:15:35 AM
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Is there a good virus "killer" searcher for the mac. ?
The mac that is a little slow at the moment is a iMac G4 1GhZ .. OS 10.4.10
It runs strangly at the moment. For example this text was quite slow to write :-(
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Go check if you have any processes that hogs a lot of resources. Happens to me every now and then.
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Rosetta hangs a lot for me, it's the next best thing to a virus, I try not to run things that aren't universal binary. Abode CS2 used to hang rosetta almost all the time, but fortunately CS3 has been out for a while.
skurk wrote:
Go check if you have any processes that hogs a lot of resources. Happens to me every now and then.
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This should have been posted in / should be moved to the "Alternative Operating Systems" forum, as it has nothing to do with Amiga.
http://www.amiga.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=10
EDIT: appears to have been done. Thanks.
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What's a Mac virus?
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moto
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@persia
He says he is using a G4, so it's not a rosetta problem.
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Open the terminal ( Applications/Utilities/Terminal ) and type "top". That will show you what is hogging your processor time in order of the biggest to the smallest processor hogging program (the "%CPU" column shows how much of the processor's time is being taken by each program).
Are you sure that you have enough memory? If you start to run short, the effect on your computer's performance is staggering.
You should have at least 512 MB of memory. 1GB would be ideal.
Okay... 100 GB would be ideal... with a 1 TB hard drive. And a Porsche.
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all I can say is: "ew, mac"
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I use ClamXav (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24449) to scan files I download for Windows while on in OS X. (Windows running through Parallels.) Has constant updated definition files, free, and has found several infected files.
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No viruses for OS X. Make sure you have enough available space on your startup disk. 2GB or more should do it. I ran out of space once and experienced similar symptoms as you are.
Joshua.
TheMud wrote:
Is there a good virus "killer" searcher for the mac. ?
The mac that is a little slow at the moment is a iMac G4 1GhZ .. OS 10.4.10
It runs strangly at the moment. For example this text was quite slow to write :-(
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Gaiyan wrote:
No viruses for OS X.
There were viruses for Classic, and there's now the one actual real-life OS X trojan (and its variants) going around in the wild. To succumb to that one you do have to click to install a "codec" you've never heard of.
Google "Zlob" and "DNSChanger" for info. It's unlikely you're infected.
There's also the potential for rogue Dashboard widgetry, which I forget the details of (was considered a gaping hole at the time, nothing ever really took advantage) and disabling Dashboard both avoids that and frees up some resources if you never intend to use it.
...
One 'par for the course' thing I ran into recently was a race condition or who-knows-what that resulted when a user accidentally tried to open about a dozen large zip files at once. The built-in unzip util stalled, and its UI has no close button or menu ('not quite an application' in Apple's mind, apparently), so I killed it and forgot about it.
Come back two weeks later, and while checking processes for unrelated reasons... it had left a few copies of 'ditto' running that apparently didn't die as child processes (seems said utility pipes to ditto to write its temporary files, go figure), and those were eating 30% CPU while doing nothing.
...
Safari can also get a bit squirrelly after enough use (not necessarily all in one session), which is why they put that 'Reset browser' item in its menu. I'm not sure what state information actually persists and bogs it down.
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Audun wrote:
all I can say is: "ew, mac"
That statement alone says "I don't know squat about computers" to me.
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:popcorn: :flame:
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My old 1.5Ghz G4 likes to crawl along some times (though, with it's 1.2gig of ram it doesn't do too badly! Remember that the G4 is a very old CPU, you can't really compare it with a shiny new Core2 duo :-)
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Hi All !!
I know this was not a Amiga Q, but it seems like this forum here, is the best to solve any kind of problem. Had the computer scanned, and it had 0 virus's .. Eventhough it's been on for 4 years !
Found some dumb startup programs that was running all the time. They are now gone, and the computer is again very fast :-)
THX !!!
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This is the Output.:
Seems Firefox is bad to my System :-S ... Sometimes over 90% :-O
.....
Processes: 60 total, 2 running, 58 sleeping... 204 threads 17:04:40
Load Avg: 2.27, 2.52, 1.97 CPU usage: 71.5% user, 9.9% sys, 18.5% idle
SharedLibs: num = 157, resident = 41.0M code, 4.65M data, 8.92M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 6576, resident = 166M + 12.1M private, 96.0M shared
PhysMem: 62.2M wired, 130M active, 289M inactive, 482M used, 29.1M free
VM: 4.02G + 125M 27905(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
246 top 7.9% 0:06.28 1 18 22 452K 424K 2.29M 27.0M
245 bash 0.0% 0:00.02 1 14 16 176K 872K 1.29M 27.2M
244 login 0.0% 0:00.03 1 16 37 148K 440K 1.65M 26.9M
242 Terminal 0.6% 0:02.06 5 97 135 1.88M 9.78M 17.8M 111M
228 Safari 0.0% 1:12.84 7 134 409 48.0M 26.2M 65.9M 198M
224 Mail 0.0% 0:16.03 7 162 267 10.3M 14.6M 19.9M 129M
222 automount 0.0% 0:00.10 3 40 30 308K 964K 1.04M 28.7M
218 firefox-bi 74.6% 9:49.92 8 100 307 30.2M 30.5M 47.3M 181M
217 automount 0.0% 0:00.11 3 42 34 308K 1000K 1.08M 29.0M
214 rpc.lockd 0.0% 0:00.00 1 10 18 108K 408K 192K 26.7M
205 nfsiod 0.0% 0:00.00 5 30 24 128K 352K 180K 28.6M
191 ntpd 0.0% 0:00.13 1 11 19 164K 556K 368K 26.9M
188 lookupd 0.0% 0:00.88 3 36 41 540K 1.02M 1.28M 29.0M
187 SymSeconda 0.0% 0:00.12 2 56 93 720K 4.51M 2.11M 92.5M
186 SymUIAgent 0.0% 0:00.43 4 68 149 1.37M 8.31M 4.56M 106M
185 SymQuickMe 0.0% 0:00.58 4 75 158 1.80M 10.5M 5.80M 111M
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@TheMud:
Firefox is not really the problem when you're getting 90% CPU usage (it could be in certain cases), but what really is the problem (usually) is the myriad of Adobe Flash applications/plugins running inside multiple tabs.
I recommend FlashBlock (Firefox plugin) which stops Flash from playing until you click the little play button. Very handy and a great speed up.
There's one other occasion (other than severe bugs) that would cause a browser in general to exhibit high CPU usage, and that is a rogue Javascript. Not a cause as often as Flash though.
All this holds true for other platforms like Linux and Windows.
As for anti-virus software, if you're scanning in Windows, I've used ClamAV before, but it didn't catch some of the baddies that www.freeav.com did, so I had to remove it. YMMV.
Lastly, if you discover the cause, it's good practice to share that info, because you will help the community you has helped you. So what were the 'rogue' startup processes/programs?
@Floid:
You're correct about ditto, and usually when it doesn't die is when there's a problem with umounting an image. So perhaps if an image is mounted (yet might not be visible on Finder) and it's trying to do stuff to it, it can cause these problems.
Skurk wrote:
Audun wrote:
all I can say is: "ew, mac"
That statement alone says "I don't know squat about computers" to me.
DITTO.
I mean, I understand some users are machosists and love the pain inflicted on them from Windows and Microsoft, but come on, you just got to rain on someone's parade just because you realize that someone's made a better choice and just having a tad bit of difficulty (something you should be happy, from your tone, you're experiencing every single day for 20 years now - if you've been a faithful since the 3.x days...) and unhappy with your self defacing choices?
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In the end, as Bob Dylan said, "you have to serve somebody." In the real world, where work gets done, it's really a choice between OS X and Windows, you can't put a Amiga in an office and, quite frankly there are only limited situations where a Linux box would suffice.
We use photoshop, Quark, Flash, Dreamweaver, the Microsoft suite and a significant number of other programs that only work in OS X and MSWindows. The Gimp, as fine a programme as it might be, is no Photoshop and Open office is still not really ready for prime time.
So we fight the battles we can win. I managed to convince my boss to go with an Intel Xserve and 3.5 TB raid in-spite of the fact that we could have gotten the equivalent much cheaper with generic parts. I count that as a victory of sorts but it just replaces an old PPC XServe and third part RAID, so the net number of Macs in my control remains the same - 3 Xserves, one PPC Mac handing email, two Gentoo Linux boxes and an SWindows 2003 raid box...
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As The Inquirer reminds me today (http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/19/apple-fixes-keyboard-problems), there have been some keyboard driver quirks that would also explain the particular responsiveness issue here.
Plugins are generally the culprit with Firefox, but as well as Flash you have Java and the media players to worry about. Be sure to apply the latest Java and Quicktime patches in Software Update as apparently they patch some remote code execution holes that were known for quite a while (and which the malicious side of the world was just reminded of).
Quicktime on Windows has the same hole, apparently, so go update that too.
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Javascript/ECMAscript can also bog down the 'fox, particularly poorly written stuff for interstitial ads and things that may be attempting to pull off cross-site scripting-type attacks.
I'm finding the Tab Permissions (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4757) extension handy compared to toggling scripting on and off entirely (or using the various scripting whitelist/blacklist extensions). You'll have to drag the controls where you want them via the 'Customize Toolbar' context menu -- putting the current-tab controls on the left side of the bookmarks bar works well, and the new-tab controls on the right side, with the 'New Tab' control moved next to them to remind you which is which -- but then if you know you're visiting a problem site, you can either crack open a new tab with restricted permissions (no redirects, etc) or disable scripting for the current one and refresh, without impacting any other tabs open.
Note that when the icons display an 'x', scripting/redirecting/??? is blocked, and when they don't, it's on. They're easily misinterpreted to mean the opposite ("Click here to ..." vs. displaying the current status), one of those problems with hieroglyphs.
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persia wrote:
[...] Open office is still not really ready for prime time. [...]
Okay, I've got to contest that -- since we're using it daily here (and the old version packaged for the last Ubuntu LTS, no less) it's only as annoying and awkward as the competition, not particularly worse. The need to actively be-aware-of and control your document layout with [paragraph, page, ...] styles is a big adjustment for users to make... but Word's document model is similar, which is why people have so many headaches with Word.
I noticed OO.o's Windows version doesn't seem to let you dock the Styles as a toolbar/pane (and remember StarOffice for OS/2 didn't back in the day, either), which is pretty much requisite to work with it comfortably if you don't have 24" of display and don't like stuff floating on top of your work. So perhaps *NIX is a prerequisite for finding it bearable.
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@Gaiyan
No viruses? No offense, but that's a little naive. Malicious software takes many forms. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to talk a typical Mac user into running a shell script containing 'rm -rf /' as a privileged user.
A well-informed user rarely encounters viruses, but not because their virus scanner is less than perfect. Rather, they don't run questionable software in the first place. And before anyone starts, I think we can skip the "Windows is questionable" jokes. ;-)
Trev
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Trev wrote:
No viruses? No offense, but that's a little naive. Malicious software takes many forms. It probably wouldn't be too
Indeed.
Trev wrote:
difficult to talk a typical Mac user into running a shell script containing 'rm -rf /' as a privileged user.
Hey, that's not a virus! That's good social engineering :-D
Trev wrote:
before anyone starts, I think we can skip the "Windows is questionable" jokes. ;-)
I wasn't going to say questionable, I was going to say "Windows is a virus"! :-D
OK, enough joking around. Because I *hate* that many people still believe that their favorite platform can't have a virus, the bare truth has to be re-enforced into their skulls, over and over and over again. Here it is:
EVERY platform can be affected by a virus.
Even Mac OS X which I love very much, and even Amiga OS which I love very much for very long time now. Heck, you give me a wrist-watch with a CPU and memory and a vulnerability and there'll be a virus on it very soon. The point is to be aware/educated and not be naive. Keep up with the general security news and trends (no need to be paranoid), and be careful what you download and run and from who/where, and of course keep backups. That'll suffice for everyone.
So a synopsis for all fan-boys:
Amiga OS *IS* vulnerable to viruses.
Mac OS X *IS* vulnerable to viruses.
Linux *IS* vulnerable to viruses.
Windows *IS* especially vulnerable due ot the sheer number (but not alone) of viruses on the platform.
Your BODY is also vulnerable, so go get some Vitamin-C to strengthen your immune system :-)