In article ,
Tim Williams wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
Which, then, leaves an awful lot of systems wide open.
But hey, Linux would be just as bad if it had 90% of the market.
Maybe so -- though they would have to learn a bit more to
*weaken* the security from as-shipped.
And OpenBSD is my favorite for secure as it installs. To
make the box less secure, you need to *learn* more about the system, and
in the process, you will hopefully learn why turning this on or that off
is a bad idea. :-)
Yes -- there are holes in linux. Not as many as Windows, but a
lot more than OpenBSD or even Solaris.
That's a
very large number of really stupid people. ("Compile my kernel? Y'mean go
get dinner from KFC?")
Of course, you only have to compile the kernel to add special
drivers to the OS, or (in the case of OpenBSD, at least, to freeze the
order in which the SCSI drives are presented. By default, the lowest
SCSI ID gets to be sd0, the next one sd1, etc. No problem until you hit
a box which has a six or twelve slot Multipack hung on it, in which case
you wind up with drive names shuffling around if you reboot with one of
the middle drives in the series unplugged. (And the Multipack is
hot-swappable drives.) Since I intend to make this box into a RAID
system, I need to keep the drive names constant, so a little editing on
the kernel configuration file, and a recompile, and there we are.
With Sun's Solaris (SysV unix) -- neither problem occurs --
SCSI drives have complex names which define exactly where they appear:
e.g. /dev/dsk/c0t2d0s6
controller 0 (built in to the CPU board)
target 2 (SCSI-IC 2)
device 0 (You can have up to seven devices on each SCSI
ID -- dates back to a single SCSI board
controlling multiple MFM or ESDI disk drives.
It is always 0 for modern drives with SCSI
built in)
slice 6 (Partition number 6 -- of seven possible with
Solaris)
And all device drivers can be run-time loaded.
I'm not sure what would happen on a Windows box with a SCSI card
added to talk to a Multipack. Normally, Windows only has to talk to
three hard drives (and one CD-ROM) at the most.
I'm not sure whether you want to lump me into that last
category, as I'm normally using Sun's Solaris and OpenBSD's unix, not
linux. :-)
Well, anyone who *thinks* they are enlightened enough to dodge M$
altogether...
Since I've been doing computing at home since before IBM funded
the rip-off of Digital Research's CP/M to become the start of
PC-DOS/MS-DOS, and I was already using a multi-user multi-tasking OS
(OS-9 -- *not* the later Mac OS by the same name), I already knew how
much better things could be. My first experience with MS-DOS was at
work.
And I even had my first unix system (v7 on 68000 CPU) at home
before a MS-DOS box came in.
There are some things for which MS-DOS is the only practical
choice for me -- these days only the annual Income tax programs -- but
for the rest of the time I am quite happy to avoid it.
Enjoy,
DoN.
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