On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 12:27:55 +0100, Anthony Anson tony.anson@zetnet.co.uk wrote:
The message 548741004101003555846b378@mail.gmail.com from Tim Green timothy.j.green@gmail.com contains these words:
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 09:25:14 +0100, Anthony Anson tony.anson@zetnet.co.uk wrote:
The message 20041009220731.GR7254@earth.li from Jonathan McDowell noodles@earth.li contains these words:
<disconnecting the box from ADSL>
Oh, sure, lots of people do (we have a customer who seems to connect up on their ADSL to pick up email and then disconnect within less than 5 minutes and do this regularly throughout the day),
As would I - though if I did have ADSL I might spend longer periods connected!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
With the number of port scans you get while online I'd be loath to leave a box sitting there as a target for the newest cleverest device to ooze in. On Friday I began loading Win 2000 (sorry!) on a pre-loved HDD at around midday.
At 02.00-ish on Saturday, the installation hung at the last lap while removing temp files. This on my fastest machine - a 450 MHz monster. I would not want to have regularly - or even again - to do that (even successfully) because I was one of the first to be hacked by some useless w***** with a twisted aim in life.
The half life of a virgin Windows PC on the Internet is under 30 minutes now. Your ADSL modem does have a built-in NAT firewall to at least protect you from port scanning, doesn't it?
I refer the honourable gentleman to my statement /\ up there.
I used the phrase "half life" because, like radioactive decay, this is a calculated statistic. Even disconnecting after 5 minutes might be 299 seconds too late after a nasty has wormed its way into your computer.
I would say a NATing router is essential for the home user, and most offices too. While Stelios Bounanos misses the free, easy and open days of the Internet, unfortunately the rise of Windows over the past 14 years has left gapping security holes in users' Internet connections that ne'er-do-wells have been taking advantage.
Of course just having a NATing routing shouldn't make one complacent, and nor has the Unix arena has been completely clean - anyone remember first hand the first Sendmail worm, or the Lovebug email worm?
Yes, it is worth trying different distributions because they all install different things by default. Hopefully the matter of configuration will have lots of common elements between them!
But-but-but-but - can't you run most of those different things from (say) Debian? (Maybe with a bit of tweaking.)
And, what sort of 'things' have you in mind? My Debian release (with apps) came on seven CDs: is there anything else I really *NEED*, bearing in mind that I never play games on PC, and all I use it for is the internet (including web-page molishing), as a sooper-dooper word-processor and DTP tool, for graphics, and, and, and, and, well, that's just about it.
Many (all?) distributions make changes to the basic programs included. These might be bug fixes or configurations, or back ported features from newer versions. Which leads on to asking which versions of distributions and packages do you want to maintain?
Tim.