[cumbria_lug] Sagem F@st 800 Modem & RH8.0

[Trevor Pearson]

 Ian Linwood  writes
>Hello Alex,
>AF> Once that's sorted and all working, what should I be looking at in terms of
>AF> anti-virus protection.
>
>Mmm, contentious one this. Idiots will claim that Linux is virus free,
>and there is no need for a virus checker. You'll be surprised to here
>that I disagree.

No, Ian I agree with you that there is no excuse for not running AV
software.  Linux is not, nor is there any reason to believe, that it
will
remain free from viruses. However it is much, much harder to write a
virus/worm for Linux, it is much harder to spread a virus/worm/trojan as
you cannot depend on a Linux box to be running a particular version of
one piece of software which has a exploitable weakness. E.g. a sendmail
worm would fail on boxes using postfix .  One of the most helpful things
Microsoft have done for virus writes is get so many people (especially
in business) using the same piece of software (Outlook) which contains
vulnerabilities .




>AF>  firewall settings or some other thing that could jump
>AF> up and bite me.
>
>Firewalls - used to do this for a living, from Checkpoint to IPF.  The
>next person that tells me that TCP wrappers has secured their machine
>will be shot a dawn.
>
>Were all here willing to contradict one another and confuse the hell
>out of you  :-)
>
Security is a state of mind.  There is no telling what is around the
corner.
Windows viruses may just clog up the net (for Linux users) but that in
itself is a problem.

Schwuk,

I was flabbergasted looking at Microsoft's SFU add. How can they
describe
'gcc' as useful and powerful and supply it with one of their 'products'
when
Linux and therefore gcc   is evil OSS ? The older versions of Unix
services
were rubbish. I would always recommend SAMBA as mapping windows
upto unix is less reliable. One fault is that you must map the 'root'
unix
account to the windows 'administrator' account to get it working and
that
is a bad idea as it means effectively that there is no security based
around
users and permissions. Also the windows server for nfs keeps it's inode
information in a file 'c:\sfu\diskshare\inode.ndx' which has a limit of
64Mb.
If it fills up the share will stop working. Microsoft have made noises
before
about dropping support for SFU too.


-- 
Penelope C. Pearson