REM State

Ah, more integration. This time, I’m bringing ClamWin into the fold of SteadyState. Remember, SteadyState can “freeze” your drive, making it easy to recover from inadvertently installing malware and the like. However, sometimes it is necessary to update the machine — especially to get hotfixes and virus updates. SteadyState has support for running these kinds of updates on a regular basis, and having their results remain permanent. The catch is that only three antivirus products are supported — CA eTrust, McAfee VirusScan, and TrendMicro OfficeScan. ClamAV is, yet again, not included. Fortunately this is an easy fix; we can add support simply by writing a VBScript file, and make it look like first-class citizen support by tweaking an XML file.

Here’s the VBScript (which should be placed in %ProgramFiles%\Windows SteadyState\Scripts), and the batch file that takes care of the heavy lifting for updating the virus definitions (which should be placed in Clamwin AV\bin). You can, at this point, specify the VBScript file as your “custom script” for scheduled updates in the SteadyState UI.

However, you can have only one custom script installed. Why waste it when we can integrate our script as a “security program update”? Open up %ProgramFiles%\Windows SteadyState\XML\SoftwareUpdates.xml with your favorite XML editor, and add the following entry:

<software
    id=”ClamWin0.93″
    name=”ClamWin Free Antivirus”
    detectionPath=”SOFTWARE\ClamWin”
    detectionName=”Path”
    append=”\clamscan.exe”
    script=”SCTFreshclam.vbs”
    category=”Anti-Virus” />

Save the file, close the SteadyState UI, and restart the Windows SteadyState service — ClamWin Free Antivirus should now show up as a security product that you can update.