DAWs and the Internet

[Ben Walker]

I'm going to be building a new DAW (PC) towards the end of the month, and I'm wondering about whether the machine will be internet enabled or not.

Up 'til now, I've religiously avoided allowing any of my DAW's to connect to the internet.
There are obviously very good reasons for this:

• Protection from viruses and other nasties
• Performance issues caused by programs polling the internet periodically for updates, etc
• Distraction - if I can't browse the net, I won't - if I can I probably will!

However, there are also good reasons, at least during the early periods when I'm building the DAW and installing all the software, to connect the computer to the internet.

• Easier registration of software
• Easier checking and downloading of updates
• Quicker access to this forum

I think I will save myself hours of time if I'm connected to the net during the build period - otherwise it means transferring files back and forth from one machine to another during each of the software installations and upgrades.

I'm not hugely concerned about viruses - I've never caught one yet, and I'm pretty cautious about opening files from non-trusted sources and my DAW has a very limited selection of software installed. Is that naive? I suppose if I do connect my DAW to the net, then I'd have to add virus protection, and that probably does incur a performance hit.

My laptop (a MacBook Pro) is permanently wirelessly connected to the net and I can't say this has caused any problems with Logic, but this is not my primary DAW.

I suppose one thing would be to connect a USB Wireless adapter whilst I'm building the PC and then remove it once I'm done, keeping it on hand for those moments when I need it (software updates mostly.)

I'm curious to know what other people here do? Do you all rigidly follow the 'No Internet on DAW PC' rule, or not? If you do connect your DAW to the net, do you find virus prrotection to be too intrusive? Any recommendations for lightweight virus protection?

Ben

[at0m]

Virus protection, what's that?

No, seriously, from the moment you have more than one computer connected, it's sure worth the expense to get a router. A router will act as a firewall for any inbound traffic: if you don't forward a port to a client machine (ie. for torrent uploads, receiving DCC, ...), it doesn't exist for the outside world. Next, the only thing that may statistically cause any damage is using Internet Explorer to browse the web's filthy pages - which I'm sure you don't, as a sensible person Attachments in your email's inbox may contain virii too - just use a web front with AV for your email, and the attachments won't ever get to your machine unless you willingly download and execute them. But how silly would that be. If you're in doubt, email the sender to ask more info about his reasons for the attachment.

Regarding the polling for updates: if you don't disable that function in apps, they will try finding a connection anyhow. So, disable the option and manually check when you're really bored or need new features.

My DAW's been online for quite some time, and I was tempted to know what virii I had cought along the way, so I installed a scanner. AVG didn't find anything. I've been using a home server proxy to connect to the web for a year or so, and the DAW's MAC address is prohibited to go on the web, as set up in the router. Only programs that I've set up with the proxy settings can access the web, and nothing from the web can reach my DAW. I admit that took a bit of setup, and may not be worthwile for smaller home networks. But with this setup, I can browse the web, run Skype, IRC and the lot, share files on my LAN, etc - all without an actual software firewall or anti-virus on the DAW.

[garyb]

sure, it can be done. no antivirus is required if you only get registrations and updates and are not connected at any other time and go to no other websites. keeping the daw off the internet is a practical consideration, not a commandment.

[iSiStOy]

router will act as a firewall for any inbound traffic

+100. If you can (or want), admin your ins AND your outs. Usually you only need to admin incoming ports&protocols and avoid any torrent/peer2peer software.

avira anti vir scanner is fine

+1. Some admin to exclude sensible audio & program directories from permanent scanning can help too.
Apart from IM softs, polling is a thing to admin but it's usually no big deal (depends on the non-audio apps you use though).
Last, I'd say: no gaming on your audio system.

edited

[valis]

Hah. I game, use the net AND do graphics as well as audio from my primary DAW. When I start doing heavy music projects I disable my AV's realtime protection (ESET Nod32) but other than that I no longer make any other major changes via the registry or removing windows subsystems and have no issues. Of course this is a project studio and I'm not billing someone else for my time, but usually if I have issues that cause me downtime it's application specific and hasn't been related to gaming etc settings for years.

I agree about getting at least a basic modern router. Aside from the convenience of certain features (like QoS tagging and uPnP) having basic stateful packet inspection in place and NAT will automatically shield you from things that seek to exploit the RPC services and so on via the latest found exploits. I like having more control and used to use a small PC running a headless linux install with monowall/ipcop etc (kill the disk and leave firewall running and if you're rooted you just reboot) but these days I find Tomato/DDWRT fine aside from the consumer routers still dying every 2-3 years. Currently I'm just on a single-antenna Linksys WRT310N running a 4 month old DDWRT development build, the router hasn't been rebooted since I flashed it and has enough bandwidth on the WAN side to handle my small 6-7 PC LAN connected to 30Mbit cable.

Games used to cause some issues 7-8 years ago or more, back when I used directX based audio plugins. Gaming related directx updates could potentially affect the audio plugins. But that was quite some time ago (before XP even) and I haven't seen any ill effects from having games installed now. I do install them to a dedicated partition on another drive though. I also don't even disable Aero, superfetch or disk indexing, I merely tweak certain parts of them by for instance disabling the window animations for maximize/minimize, and telling windows indexing to only index things that I want it to and so on.

That being said I've yet to even have a virus (using PC's since 1986) on any of *my* work machines, it's typically the wife or guest PC that gets infected since they're less aware of what certain warning signs are. BUT even on my machine nod32 has caught infection attempts from large sites that you wouldn't expect it from. And more and more these days, fortune1000 sites (and bank sites etc) are high profile targets for malware/virus writers, and many are not secured as well as they should be (from sql injection etc.) So I certainly wouldn't run without realtime protection if directly exposed to the net, I'd rather catch the infection as it attempts to deploy itself than once it's already somewhere on my system.

Or of course use a different PC, but for personal use I find it handy to just use one OS for all my tasks these days and don't have any major issues.