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. -- brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US +1 713 440 7475 | http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc | My opinion only troff on top of XML: http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc/code/thwack OpenPGP: RSA v4 4096b 88AC E9B2 9196 305B A994 7552 F1BA 225C 0223 B187
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