Hej, what kind of nano-scale-run was that?
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Dragons can fly because they don't fit into pirate ships

Hej, what kind of nano-scale-run was that?

Aye, Capt'n

All's been working well with the regression testing on Linux, although I'm still in the process of setting up the 64 bit machine to do it. Let me know if you want me to try to get VS up and running either under XP or Vista (alsa, both are only 32 bit).
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Kathryn :o)
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Same problem with virus alert from AVAST!. Have stopped Pirates on all my PCs. Please check your system.
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I am not getting this kind of warning with McAfee 8.5i, so I wonder if it is specific to the detection algorithm in a particular anti-virus package? Also, I have another machine in another location using a version of Norton and have received no reports of problems (though they may not have seen anything yet).


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Hmm, I am hopeful that this is a false alarm.

But in any case it certainly needs to be investigated and taken seriously. I have turned off work generation until we sort this out, and I do recommend that everybody check their own virus software. (That's always good advice, but an occasion like this serves as a good reminder.)

Here's what I know so far.

The application hello 6.02 for windows was built using BOINC 6.3.10 (the SVN trunk), revision 16023, with only one line of code commented out (as detailed in these release notes), and put out for the crew on the evening of 18 Sept. 2008. (We started with only 50 WU's, which lead to the first post in this thread. More followed.) There is both an executable (.exe file) and a symbol table (.pdb file). We've been giving out work, albeit not much, almost continuously since then. This is the first report of a problem with these files (assuming they are the same files - let's check).

The application was built on a Windows 2000 machine which is behind a firewall and kept up to date (as much as you can for W2K :-), using MS VC++ 2003. The machine is monitored by Symantic Anti-Virus Corporate Edition, with an up-to date virus definitions file (2008-10-8 rev 3). I have an automated scan run every Saturday morning. Just now I ran a scan of the build directory and found nothing. I also made a copy of the Pirates@Home download directory, where everybody gets these files, and ran the virus scan over that. Nothing was found.

It's possible that AVAST sees something in these files that makes it think they contain a virus. It's also possible that the files have somehow been replaced or modified. Here are the MD5 hashes and sizes of the files:

AVAST has had problems with BOINC and application files on other projects, so I lean toward that as the likely explanation here. See for example:

http://climateprediction.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=5336&sid=7a4723eb837dd31ac2a6f2d6e7f38e9b

or here:

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=3017&nowrap=true
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The proof here is the report AVAST:

08/10/2008 22:59:22 SYSTEM 1824 Sign of "Win32:SkiMorph [Cryp]" has been found in "C:ProgramDataBOINCprojectspirates.spy-hill.nethello_6.02_windows_intelx86.exe" file.
08/10/2008 23:08:07 SYSTEM 1824 Sign of "Win32:SkiMorph [Cryp]" has been found in "C:ProgramDataBOINCprojectspirates.spy-hill.nethello_6.02_windows_intelx86.exe" file.