Sophosticated

Sophosticated is a handy tool made up of two BASH scripts. One script is all about installing updates for the Sophos virus scanner from a CD, while the other helps you download, unpack, and install the latest IDEs. Pretty cool, right?

Requirements for Running Sophosticated

To make these scripts work, you'll need BASH or a shell that can handle it. They were originally created on a Mandrake Linux 8.0 setup and still run smoothly up to Mandrake 9.1. Just keep in mind that you might need to tweak the paths for some utility programs like ls, gawk, grep, mail, logger, and eject. Also, I installed Sweep in my /home/sweep directory instead of the default one, so check if you did it differently.

How I Use Sophosticated Daily

I personally run the auto_update_ides script three times each day and update Sweep daily as well. The staff at my client's place leave any new Sophos CD in the drive over the weekend so that our update script can grab it when needed. If you want to use it like I do (assuming there’s nothing else in root's crontab), just type crontab -l to check your setup and then use crontab crontab.

No Guarantees with Sophosticated

The scripts work well for me, and they should function fine on most Unix systems too. You might even get them running on BeOS, OS/2, or OS/X—but remember there are no guarantees! If something goes wrong, well…you get to keep both pieces! That’s part of the GPL terms.

A Little Note on Updates

What's New: In this release, we’ve clearly defined the "top directory" at the beginning of each script. If you're installing Sophos in /home/sweep like I do, you'll want to make sure to change this setting since it currently matches Sophos' default path (/usr/local). Also, because /usr/local/tmp usually isn't there, these scripts will use $TMPDIR for temporary files if $TOPDIR/tmp isn't found.

If you're ready to take your system management to another level with Sophosticated, you can check out more details or download it from Sophosticated here!