OT: SCO Forum

[Fairlight]

Only Bill Campbell would say something like:
> 
> While we support several different flavours of Unix and Linux, the systems
> we build are all on SuSE Linux Enterprise 9 because Novell provides support
> over an extended period of time.  

*raises hand*  Yes, question about that...

Any word on when 9.0 goes EOL?  I know you haven't been able to report bugs
for anything but 10.x on Novell's site for some time now, despite the fact
that patches continue to appear for 9.0 when necessary.

I'm -still- not comfortable with the kernel level of 2.6, and after knowing
what the apache group did with 2.x, I'm not really looking forward to that
either (not that there'll be much choice if I want to stick with
vendor-supplied packages).

First place I've seen a 10.x installation put it in and immediately had a
problem with a corrupt registry in samba (I don't know when that was
implemented or what the philosophy behind a registry was, but I find it
disturbing that it was either shipped corrupt or that easy -to- corrupt).

So far, I'm not thinking 10.x is quite ready from my own experiences
(limited) and some other accounts I've heard.

But I'm getting twitchy about when 9.x may go EOL for good.  I've been
through that with RHL 7.3 right before moving to SuSE, and I'd really
rather be -ahead- of the curve this time than behind it.

> If Windows were reliable, and didn't have fundamental security problems, we
> might even support Windows.  If our customers want to use Windows, we can
> work with that, but warn them of the security and reliability problems
> inherent when Windows machines are put on a network.  When we started
> selling our InterRack ISP systems in 1994, build on SCO Unix, and people
> asked for Windows, I told them to go to somebody else as there was no way
> to build reliable and secure systems on Windows.

Did you read the SANS alerts this week?  For anyone that didn't, here's a
nice eye-opener:

Widely Deployed Software
(1) CRITICAL: Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (MS06-021)
(2) CRITICAL: Microsoft Word Remote Code Execution (MS06-027)
(3) CRITICAL: Microsoft Windows Media Player Remote Buffer Overflow (MS06-024)
(4) HIGH: Microsoft PowerPoint Remote Code Execution (MS06-028)
(5) HIGH: Microsoft Windows JScript Remote Command Execution (MS06-023)
(6) HIGH: Microsoft Windows ART Image Handling Remote Code Execution (MS06-022)
(7) HIGH: Adobe Reader Multiple Unspecified Vulnerabilities
(8) HIGH: Microsoft Excel Remote Code Execution (0-day)
(9) MODERATE: Microsoft Windows TCP/IP Remote Code Execution (MS06-032)
(10) MODERATE: Microsoft Windows Routing and Remote Access Remote Code Execution (MS06-025)
(11) MODERATE: Microsoft Windows WMF Handling Overflow (MS06-026)
(12) LOW: Sendmail MIME Message Denial-of-Service

Anyone noticing a trend, or at least a heavy leaning, here?  Nine of the
top twelve security holes for widely deployed non-web software are in
Microsoft products.  (And of course, in the web-based software, PHP-based
packages take the prize yet again...never fails.)

And then someone sent me a Word document to alter and return.  Needless
to say it was virus scanned immediately.  They always are.  But I really
didn't want to use it -right- after seeing this.

mark->