Filepro-list Digest, Vol 42, Issue 43

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 12:12:57PM -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2007, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> >On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 02:36:56PM -0400, Boaz Bezborodko wrote:
> >> But this will only help a little in getting more people on Linux.  Linux 
> >> is just too easy to break by the average user and too difficult to just 
> >> get up and running. 
> >
> >You wanna expand on that a bit, Bo?
> >
> >Cause, in my 23 years of experience, I've *never* had a user break a
> >*nix machine.  Ever.  I'm only had 6 panics in that time, and 4 of them
> >were bad hardware.  1 a bad driver, and I never did trace down the
> >other one.
> 
> I've had user *nix machines cracked via the 'Net because of users with weak
> passwords and shell accounts.  Usually they haven't managed to gain root
> access, but have installed IRC servers running at user levels which can be
> annoying.

Ok, so the machine isn't "broken", it's just running things you didn't
want because it's administrator is sloppy and a) didn't run a
password-strength tester on password changes, b) didn't run a password
cracker to look for Joe's, b) didn't firewall the machine so that
unwanted traffic couldn't get in and out.

The point here, of course, is that administrators *can*
deterministically do those things on *nix.

> >Average uptime: until we had to change some piece of hardware; usually
> >every 6-9 months; I have broken a year a few times.
> 
> My best uptime was a FreeBSD 4.8 machine that hit 900 days before a 3am
> power outage that didn't wake me to turn on the generator took all our
> systems down when the UPS batteries drained.  Most of our systems now have
> an uptime of 245 days now since that was when the power last went out.

Got any windows machines, Bill?  ;-)
  
> >My last Linux install: SuSE 10.2 from DVD.  Human time: about an hour;
> >machine time, about 2.5 hours.
> 
> I timed a fully automatic kickstart install of CentOS 5 yesterday at 45
> minutes, of which about 2 minutes was the human time to boot from CD, and
> enter ``linux ks=cdrom:/ks.cfg'' to start it.  This is a network install
> from a local server here.
> 
> Autoyast installs of SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 take about the same.

This was an older slower box.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
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