Posts by Stephan

Ubuntu 10.10: date with destiny missed

Date with destiny missed?

The "date with destiny missed" headline is a bit dramatic isn't it?!

You can't really call it a failure for a partitioning non-issue.

RHEL 6 - your sensible but lovable friend

Enterprise distributions

> "Of course, the whole point of running an enterprise distro like RHEL is that it isn't Ubuntu or Fedora, and it doesn't completely change all the rules every six months."

Can you clarify that? Are you saying that Ubuntu isn't an enterprise distribution?

Ubuntu Server LTS is an enterprise distro with (optional) commercial support and is supported for 5 years. Definitely not a 6 month rule changer. If you want a less stable distro, you can go for the non-LTS releases.

Fedora on the other hand is totally different and I'm not sure the two should be compared like that. I think the section of the article above is misleading.

Exploit code for Kaminsky DNS bug goes wild

Some users might not notice lack of SSL/TLS, most Internet banking is really bad anyway!

Tom and Chris, what you say is true. However, some users might not notice if they are on an SSL/TLS secured site or not and might enter their information anyway. I believe that most users are now educated when it comes to making sure SSL/TLS is in use, but there must be some that aren't and there *not* being something on the screen might slip past many of them. Hopefully not too many.

This exploit is a pain, as they all are. What really scares me though is how so many banks still require the user to enter the complete password to get in.

Some are better with, "Enter characters 4, 8 and 5" prompts (for example), but I can think of many where people are totally vulnerable to keyloggers. I've seen one which uses drop-down menus which goes a little further to protect against this.

In the end, nothing is secure is it... we just have to do our best to stay ahead of the game and users need to take a bit of responsibility and care. The world needs sysadmins so although this stuff is a pain, at least it keeps us in a job!

Hotmail dies on both sides of the Atlantic

Well, yeah, but...

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely can't stand Microsoft but.... how much are (most of?) the users paying for hotmail and msn messenger etc? Nothing? In that case I don't think it is fair to complain. Outages happen to all companies at some time or another. Of course, I suppose they make their money from advertising, but basically it is a free service.

That said, I can't wait till Microsoft fails. Open source is the future. Openoffice, Ubuntu, etc, they're not just "alternatives" anymore. They are the way forward. Combined with open document formats, I can't see any reason to keep using Office especially. Windows Vista, well I think it's agreed that there is no obvious reason to be using that either. If you haven't made the switch yet, now is the time, believe me!