OT: SCO Forum

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006, Fairlight wrote:
>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 presume you're talking about 9.0 Professional, not SuSE Linux
Enterprise 9 (SLES9).  I suspect that 9.0 Pro is considered obsolete now.  I
think that Novell is supporting SuSE Linux Enterprise 8 still, which has
the 2.4 kernels.

I haven't looked at the contracts on SuSE Enterprise versions, but I think
they provide at least 3 year support in theese, including providing updated
drivers (SLES9 SP3 just came out with full 64 bit support and updated
hardware drivers).

>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).

I haven't had an problems with the 2.6 kernels in SuSE 9.2 Pro and later
SuSE releases.  I gave SuSE 9.1 Pro a miss as it was the first of the 2.6
kernel versions for SuSE.

>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).

We don't use SuSE's Samba or most of the other server software, preferring
to use the OpenPKG versions where I have far more control, being one of the
active OpenPKG developers.

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

I haven't seen any major issues on the various Linux mailing lists I read.
I've installed 10.0 on a few desktop systems, without finding any major
gotchas.  It installed on my 1999 ThinkPad 600, but I ran into interrupt
problems which made 32-bit CardBus cards unusable so I'm still running SuSE
9.2 Pro on that box.

My primary desktop these days is a Mac Mini running OS X Tiger.  I switch
to a Linux desktop only when I need to test something directly from the
desktop instead of via an X11 client.

>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.

Switch to a Mac :-).

>> 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:

There was a very interesting article on security issues that questioned the
value of ``virus'' reports from organizations that depend on Microsoft
security holes for their existence.  I found the comments on CERT's
advisories particularly interesting.

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/06/06/1832223&from=rss

>(12) LOW: Sendmail MIME Message Denial-of-Service

Sendmail is probably as close to a virus as one is likely to find in the
*NIX community.  When we first connected to the 'Net, my first priority was
to find a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) that did SMTP and wasn't sendmail.  At
that time (about 1991) the CERT advisories for sendmail were about the same
weight as a Manhattan phone book.

>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.

Open the Microsoft Office documents with OpenOffice.org, edit, and return
them as files in the Portable Document Format.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill
the world with fools. -- Herbert Spencer (1891)