Peter wrote:
On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 21:00:18 +0100, in linux.debian.isp you wrote:I will be new user of Debian. For quick tour I want to learn and Iwant to get your advise about Comparing other OS with Debian .well, three really bad kernel bugs and now on 2.6 kernel so many new things - in 2004 linux administrators will have to follow security mailing lists very closely. it will be a time consuming job to updatekernels every x weeks.
It's not only when kernel bugs appear, that admins have to follow security lists very closely, it's just about everytime.
As for the time consuming job part, it may be so, if your hardware is something like a pentium mmx, nowadays it takes less than 3 or 4 minutes to recompile a 2.4, and maybe other 3 or 4 mins. from reboot to login prompt.
Also you will have to be a security expert to get a secured system, as neither debian nor redhat kernels are "hardened" out of the box. maybeit´s better to take a look at adamantix.org, that is based on debian.
I'd partially disagree on this one. There is no such thing as a 'secured system'. Security is a relative thing, not an absolute one.
I believe that if the common debian admins keep their systems up to date with the latest security patches released by debian, they'll deter probably 99% of the available exploits. The remaining 1% would fall on the unpublished exploits or those which are 'work in progress', and thus only targeted and crafted for the high profile sites which should have a security expert in their payroll anyway.
On the other hand, it certainly adds comfort to have a buffer-over-underrun-proof kernel running on the server.
if freebsd is in your choice, take a deeper look into it. seems to be much more developed. better "jail" solution, especially interesting for webhosting. Better accounting, better filesystem.
What exactly is developed? *BSD is certainly based in a much older code base than linux, but at this point in time, I'd say that most of the cutting edge stuff is happening more on the linux side of the free unixes (hardware support, filesystems, clustering, virtualization, etc), also linux has had for quite a while now, a much broader base of _developers_ (google for "the cathedral and the bazaar").
Is UFS a better filesystem than ext2 in terms of robustness and speed? *maybe*. Better than Reiserfs? hardly.
that´s how it appears to me. i have average admin knowledge and judge only on one thing: "how much time does it cost to keep the system running". Linux was to expensive last year. Peter
Also, these are just my opinions. We used to serve everything here for ~8k users (email, web hosting, web caching, etc.) on FreeBSD, these were the 2.x-3.x 'make world for update' times. Since some 4 years now we grown to ~11k users, and everything runs on Debian and that's just because of the quality that maintainers put on their packages and the the distro in general, and the consequent ease for updating, securing, and managing debian servers.
Jose