Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!corton!laas!ralph From: ralph@laas.fr (Ralph P. Sobek) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: only_ste.lzh (was Re: ST User Virus!) Summary: No boot viruses in only_ste.msa Message-ID: Date: 29 May 91 10:00:03 GMT References: <1991May24.015422.23817@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au> <10099@suns2.crosfield.co.uk> <1991May28.202555.16251@lsuc.on.ca> Sender: news@laas.laas.fr Distribution: comp Organization: LAAS-CNRS France Lines: 43 In-reply-to: jimomura@lsuc.on.ca's message of 28 May 91 20:25:55 GMT In article <1991May28.202555.16251@lsuc.on.ca> jimomura@lsuc.on.ca (Jim Omura) writes: | This brings to mind that 1 of the things | I looked at from the Net recently was this "only_ste.lzh" sound | demo package. Now this is a strange package with what seems to | be a whole disk compressed into an ".MSA" file which in turn was | LHARC'd. I unpacked this kit just this morning. When I unpacked | the disk I used the MSA.PRG auto-formatting command. It seems to | me that this method of packaging might allow for transporting of | boot sector or other viruses. Has anybody else unpacked this demo | kit recently? I just unpacked this demo for friends last nite! I don't have an STe or MegaSTe, but I got 4 Mb and they were needed. First off, I received only_ste.lzh through the News at work. Unfortunately, only_ste.lzh is incompatible with MS-DOS compatible floppy disks, since they're limited to 720 Kb. As a reminder, only_ste.lzh is 802661 bytes long. What to do? I used "split" on my SPARC to chop the file in half. Each half was put on a separate floppy and taken home. At home, I became worried about concatenating two binary file parts together. I then decided to run full blown GNU emacs (not mg, jove, nor micro-emacs) with a 1 Mb RAM disk. I then inserted into my emacs buffer both halfs of the file and saved it to the RAM disk. Of course there was no more room to unpack the file. It tested out okay. Well, I copied it to a floppy and extracted back to the RAM disk. I then ran MSA to create the demo floppy. Ouffhh!!! ;-| The first thing I did then was to run VKILLER on it. It stated that the floppy was executable, but no known virus was found!! 8-) Did anyone have a much easier time of it? I only hope that few items of this sort travel through USENET or are uploaded to atari.archive. Normally, large *.lzh or *.zoo can be split up differently since the individual member files are less than 720 Kb. -- Ralph P. Sobek Disclaimer: The above ruminations are my own. ralph@laas.fr Addresses are ordered by importance. ralph@laas.uucp, or ...!uunet!laas!ralph If all else fails, try: sobek@eclair.Berkeley.EDU =============================================================================== Proud owner of a Mega 4 ST. Wishing it was a Mega STe! :-|