On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 09:05:48 -0500, Odinn wrote:
On 12/23/2005 11:22 AM Dave Hinz mumbled something about the following:

Of course you have support. And if you have a problem where your boss
encourages blamestorming rather than solving problems with the
appropriate solutions, you need to upgrade your boss.

Online banking is a lot different than something used by the mortgage
companies internally. Firewalls in front of the web server, firewalls
between the app server and the database with commuications via IPSec.
OSes hardened. I'm sure you don't want your account to be hacked by
someone else.

Of course not. It's interesting that at least one online bank has gone
to shipping Knoppix (Linux) Live CDs to their customers for use of their
banking site. "Here's a hardened OS for your PC, to connect to us
with". Yeah, I can dig up a cite if you want to be confrontational.

On top of the banks themselves, we have about 5 or 6 different audits
due to some govt regulation (SOX, SEC, Some California thing, etc).

Yes, I'm familiar with those.

It's not my boss who encourages blaming, it's the banks who want
assurance. They won't allow us to use Linux unless we pay for support
on it, and only a small portion of the banks we host will even allow
Linux (we host over 2000 banks online presense).

We must work in very different financial industries. Which is odd since
the banks whose names are probably on cards in your wallet, don't care
what OS we're running anything on. Even the more annoying ones.

5 years ago we had a guy saying much the same thing you are. We made
the changes anyway, where appropriate, and the sky continued to not
fall, the customers (banks) continued not to stay away in droves, the
auditors (internal, government, and "sent by customers") just want to
see the vulnerabilities and what we've done about them; not what kernel
a piece of hardware is running.

Maybe it's not your boss, who needs the upgrading.