Re: [mv] Best Linux Security Solution...?

[Chris Rapier <rapier@psc.edu>]

******    message to minivend-users from Chris Rapier <rapier@psc.edu>     ******


> If anything I would like to know of any flavors of LINUX to
> specifically "avoid", or if anyone has used a similar
> setup/configuration to ours, I would love to hear a brief history of
> any problems discovered.

While this may start a religious war please do not take it as such...

I do not think linux is your best solution for a large network based
application. Many people in the Linux community will agree that the
networking stack under Linux is not as mature as those available in the
various flavors of BSD. Some of the largest network sites in the world
are based strictly on FreeBSD, one of three available varients. These
sites include Yahoo, Xoom, USWest, CDRom.com, and ironically enough,
hotmail.com. This isn't a slam against Linux but an OS is just a tool
and different jobs require different tools. 

The security issues related to each OS really are dependant on your
sysadmin. The out of box security defaults for BSD tend to be stricter
than those with Linux but either one can be tightened down. Where I work
we placed the web server outside of the firewall, shut down *all* ports
except for HTTP and SSH and do all development on secure boxen inside
the firewall. There is only one user account on this machine and all
files are transfered using SCP (using a web tree syncing program I
wrote). 

You can get more information about BSD at the following locations
www.freebsd.org
www.netbsd.org
www.openbsd.org

All of these OSes are very similar but come from different philosophies.
NetBSD will probably give you your best performance on your hardware but
has the most involved setup. FreeBSD is a very good balance between ease
of use and performance. Also, the ports collection really does RPM out
of the water. :)

Chris Rapier
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