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?
(Bearing in mind that I have no intention of *EVER* loading XP),
Shame - with SP2 it's not too bad now. You can turn the theme back to that classic Win2000 style too if the primary colours hurt your eyes.
Is there any point in having a different Linux distro, when one has Debian (and Knoppix) available?
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!