Muzzy, why does Windows rule?

[toadlife]

Those guys must not know their own license...

Yeah. Usually the people that annoy me the most fit into that category. I ran across the epitome of ignorance in this area awhile ago. Here is an actual quote from some internet forum...

Here is the actual post.

"First of all, by 'free' they mean you can copy, edit, recompile, or give out your code and recompiled programs. It has nothing to do with price, although most of the time you can get software because someone else will have given it out for free to you.
 
Second of all, FreeBSD is a different flavor of Unix. If you want rock-solid security, you need Open Source. It's that simple. Windows XP is simply too vulnerable to attacks, and even if tonight we all got a patch for them, we'd still be vulnerable because new holes could be discovered - closed source means only Billy Boy can patch them up, Open Source means you can, or you can beg your friends to if you don't know C/C++.
 
Third of all, BSD and Linux run two different liscenses. Linux is GNU, meanning completely free. Under the BSD liscense, you can mess with the code, so long as you don't claim your rights to it. It's kind of like this: GNU is completely and totally anarchist, and the BSD liscense has some kind of predefined order. They both have ups and downs.
 
   Since linux is more popular at the time, more people have gotten around to make their own variants of it. Check out www.linuxiso.org and see what I mean."      

I've seen others like this too.

[Calum]

that's kind of like the truth, but using all the wrong words!

[noob]

ill put my bit in here.  i use both windows and linux systems and linux has only crashed once, when i put the hdd in a new machine and it couldn't cope with a change off all the hardware. my 2000/2000 serer/ XP Pro servers have crashed, failed, been attacked. i even got my server 2000 attacked through a closed firewall before i had fully logged in. i never use a firewall on linux, never been attacked. my server is mostly open and i will happily leave it running, unattanded and know i will not have popups for XXX.com/hyperporn when i get back. just my input as i have used several windows versions and linux distributions.

[Calum]

i'd still recommend using a firewall, a system is only as secure as it's administrator can make it, my problem with windows is that it only allows the administrator to go so far along that road.

[noob]

ya i like firewalls somtimes, but as it's not a known server, its no prob yet.

[toadlife]

I think, in certain scenarios, the benefits of firewalls can be overrated. For example, putting a firewall in front of a server that has no daemons listening. It's like giving a deaf person ear plugs.

There is the possibilty of a strict firewall setup limiting a worm's ability to communicate - but if a worm infects your system, you have more problems to deal with than how your firewall is set up.

[muzzy]

Typically people still run SSH, which at one point in time gained a name of "Super Security Hole". By merely having ssh daemon running, the system could've been taken over, and lots and lots of systems indeed were. It could happen again.

I never ran firewall on Windows NT based systems. I only used to run it on 9x, where the network stack was so royally fucked that you needed a firewall to filter out packets that the system couldn't handle without crashing. Linux had a few of such issues in the past, too. That, too, could happen again. And we're definitely going to see it happen again once we get into ipv6. Then, it might not be quite so silly to have a hardware firewall sitting in front of a network that has no daemons running.

My primary annoyance on WinNT without firewall was the RPC service which simply could not be closed from the network. It would always listen, unless you hacked it. That royally sucked, however I left it open just to dare all the hackers out there. I took some precautions, though, such a disabling DCOM and other fun stuff... years before the DCOM vulnerabilities became known

Overall, firewalls are good stuff, however I couldn't sleep at night if I knew my system could be taken over if the firewall were somehow to disappear. You never know what kind of implementation issues even the hardware firewalls might have...

[noob]

i won't run windows without a firewall. too risky, considering i have college work on it hosted to the world.