Re: Debian on Sun box any advantage?
Sparc also provides a console port which makes headless operations easier.
Sean
brian m. carlson wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 01:18:26PM -0700, John Bevins wrote:
>> Hello Everyone,
>>
>> I don't know much about Sun boxes. What advantage, if any, is there
>> to running Debian on a Sun box as opposed to a brand name x86 server?
>
> It makes exploiting the machine harder. Normally, an attacker will try
> to exploit buffer overflows using i386 shellcode. If the service is
> vulnerable, it will probably crash (instead of arbitrary code being
> run), since i386 shellcode doesn't work on sparc. Note that if an
> attacker really wants to break in, the differing architecture will
> probably not matter; he or she will simply use sparc shellcode. But
> script kiddies randomly searching for a machine to break into will
> probably not bother.
>
> If you really care about accurate floating-point operations, sparc has
> support for float, double, and (in the 64-bit versions) long double. On
> i386 machines, by default, all floating-point operations are performed
> in long double mode, so some results are less accurate than they might
> otherwise be. amd64 does not have the problems of i386 in this case.
>
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