Re[2]: [Cumbria] Christmas: a time of upheaval...

[Ian Linwood]

Hello Schwuk,

Sunday, December 29, 2002, 9:25:01 PM, you wrote:

> It's not really the same - I (pretty much) trust Red Hat to tell me what
> is applicable for my machine without nosing around where it shouldn't 
> like MS (probably) does with Windows Update. I do support Red Hat, and 
> the Red Hat Network, it's just I like to have my boxes up-to-date...

I trust no-one :-(
Although I do not think that RH would stoop to the depths of MS in
their 'intelligence gathering'.

>> What about SuSE????? Go on  --- give it a try! I could bring a set of 
>> v8.0 Professional disks to the next meet.

> Thanks, but I'm still not keen on this "buy before you try" thing that 
> SuSE has, and I'm not sure I want to support that...

This kind of evangelism reminds me of the 7th Day Eventists who
arrived at my door the morning after a party. I answered the door (them having woken me up) in
my boxer shorts, stinking of stale booze, etc. and no doubt looking a
little rough. They took one look at me, hastily handed me some
brochures (re God, the evils of alcohol, etc) said 'you really NEED to read
these'. They looked concerned and started to back away, but not before
I told them to 'Fcuk off and don't come back'. I used the brochures to
light the fire.

Anyway, back to updates...I do not like automatic updates. One reason
is the 'trust' thing. Not that I think RH or any other company would
do the nasty on me, but I'm of the school of thought - 'If you want
something doing right, do it yourself'.

The other is that most of my kernels are custom (security and
performance reasons). The services I install are all compiled from
source and installed in non default paths. This helps avoid some
tricks played by script kiddies (looking for the likes of httpd, ftpd
or ssh) who rely of default installs to find vulnerabilities.

I  keep an eye on CERT advisories and bugtrack, etc. and only fix what
I feel REALLY does need fixing. If it ain't broke - don't fix it.

-- 
Best regards,
 Ian                            mailto:ian@darksideofthemoon.org.uk