On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 14:17, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Ignoring recommended patches - whether from Redhat, > Microsoft, IBM, or whomever - will bite you in the CPU one day. Yes, but .... with Linux and other *NIX OS's I can install most patches on a running system without a need to shut it down or reboot. With MS most any change meant a reboot in the past; they are getting a bit better, but still rather archaic to require most of the reboots it does. > Never once has it been suggested that I "recompile the Windows OS" to get > maximum performance from my computer; Of course it has not been recommended; you cannot! You do not get the source. Many, many things *could* be optimized in MS OS's *if* you had the source. Not an option. As it is, there are many arcane things to be done on Windows to optimize performance; slumming around in the registry and modifying values, adding keys, etc. is de rigeur in the Windows world, and much more time consuming that compiling a kernel. Try optimizing the MTU on you NT machines! Trivial command line in Linux, done on running machine; registry key addition and reboot on NT. > "re-compile the kernel" in response to a question about Linux performance. Of course. Distributions come with kernels with lots of stuff stashed in their that most folks never need. Slim it down, get better performance. If I have many similar computers, I recompile once and then distribute to many. Rather efficient. Try moving your registry key changes from machine to machine (yes, you can export parts of the tree, but if you have many changes, that is a lot of exports and imports). > I read stories where someone has seen a performance increase after > replacing Windows with Linux, I personally have yet to see it. Anecdotally > (ie, with no benchmarks) my Dell Latitude is about half as speedy running > in Linux as it in Windows. To get the same performance from Linux, would > I need to get a faster computer? Something else to factor into the TCO. Depends on the use of the machine. For *any* server function I can get better performance from Linux on almost any box. For desktop, it depends on what the person runs. Still, if you chuck the popular bloatware (Gnome and KDE) for the desktop, it is a race that Linux can win in a majority of cases. Need to know the OS and the pieces. > For me, and probably 90%+ of the admins out there, > it's far easier to recover from a security breech in a MS-based system (or > network) than a Linux-based one. Why? Because it's what we know - and > therefore is likely to be the least costly alternative. And 90%+ of Windows admins are deluding themselves into believing they have recovered from incidents. In most cases I can scan their machines and find backdoors open on obscure ports, registry keys left in place that open other vulnerabilities, etc. 90%+ of Windows admins recover from incidents using a cookbook method: install this patch, reboot, run the virus scanner, delete all infected files ... blah blah blah. They do not understand enough to know that one penetration often engenders other intrusions, and the damage can be much broader than the simple situation they believe they have under control. Yes most admins are more comfortable fixing Windows problems, but that is because they do not understand the problems and are delusionally comfortable with following a cookbook. > I stand by my statement about viruses and worms - as Linux desktops become > more prevalent, so will the Linux-based malware. Why desktops? Because > that's what the "uninformed" (1) will be using and abusing; the same type > of problems we see on Windows desktops will be seen on Linux desktops. Yes, there will be malware, but the OS will provide *much* better protection and the scope of the problem will be less than what we have seen from the never-ending parade of stuff hitting the MS world. Not allowing users to change system configs (aka registry keys) and not allowing them to open all devices and ports, like most Windows user can, protects the machine, the network, and the world from most malware. There have been multiple attempts to introduce virii and worms into the *NIX world; so far only a few have succeeded (e.g., the Morris worm from the mid 80's); the *NIX world learned and moved away from giving services and users the types of access needed to propogate these beasts. - rick -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
