Gates: There's a home server in your future

TalkBack 19 of 47:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

Secure?

I'm tired of hearing the same old same old about linux security. It's a load of crap, and the same old crap every linux supporter has been throwing around for ever.

Ok, I'll admit that that it isn't attacked as often, that there aren't as many virus's, trogan horses, etc. out there that take advantage of Linux. But the truth is that there aren't because it is a waste of most people's time to take advantage of Linux's holes because so few people actually run Linux. It's a bang for your buck type thing. Same with Apple MacIntoshes.

The simple truth is that it's a numbers thing. If 84% of the market used Linux, we would all be hearing every day of a new threat to Linux.

Do I say this because I'm uniformed? No, the opposite. I've worked in development and network administration for years now. I've rolled out Linux servers just about as often now as windows servers. In addition I've worked with SCO Unix and AIX. And I've never seen a system that hasn't been or couldn't have been hacked if someone wanted to. In fact, we once had someone using one of our RISC6000 AIX boxes to store movies on. They had been able to hack our network security, then create an admin account on an AIX server, and easily store and retrieve movies from it. It didn't take long to identify the problem, but I'm guessing it didn't take the hacker long to do it either. And our mail server on a linux server got hacked once too by some spammer. When we started receiving spam from ourselves(our domain name was used in the senders address) we knew immediately that we had a problem. Again, someone had been able to hack into the system, gain admin privledges, enable relaying, and then deliver emails to our system for delivery.

Point is, any system, linux, microsoft, sun, aix, etc. are all vulnerable. That is why every corporation spends so much on network security. And my experiance has been that windows servers are not the dominant server out there (yes, they're quickly gaining). So, if it were only windows that were so poor, don't you think that corporations would actaully stop using them in favor of some flavor of Unix? Excactly. It's because corporations have discovered that flavors of unix(including Linux) are no more secure than windows, nor are they any less secure. So the real argument comes down to the total cost of ownership. I suspect windows is winning the server battle out there because windows has proven over time that the total cost of owning windows servers is less.

Hey, finally, don't get me wrong. I like Linux. I've done a lot of unix administration so even before the desktops like KDE were abvailable or as nice as they are now, I didn't mind Linux. In fact, on most of the linux server installations that I've done or worked on, we haven't even installed the desktop, just like on AIX we seldom install X Windows. We do command line and it works great. So, I don't have anything against Linux. It's just not the end all be all that so many Linux Zealeouts claim it is.

Posted by: mgrubb@...   Posted on: 01/08/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
• The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Infrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now