While I’m not claiming that Linux is a virus-free operating system. It’s very rare to be faced with any critical virus like those normally-found on Windows.

I has setup several Linux boxes for the file-sharing service. While the most of Windows virus wouldn’t affect to the linux box directly, my Linux boxes will become the virus carriers. That’s why I need anti-virus on Linux.

There’s some effort to provide on-access virus scan like ClamFS or samba-vscan. These efforts are very likely try to emulate live scan in Windows anti-virus software. But what I’m really need is to prevent my Linux boxes from being the carrier so I’m thinking about after-access anti-virus.

The idea is quite simple, any file that written into the disk should be scan immediately. For the users’ aspect, the file will be open upon the time they request it. There will be very low latency for this scheme. But after all users finished with their files, every files on the server will be guaranteed that they are all virus clean.

The implementation is fairly simple and not invasive to others service. I use pyinotify combined with pyclamd. Most code came from both library tutorial so I decide to use it internally for a while and hope this can be released to the world when it ready.