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Old 04-11-2008, 06:23 PM
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jtmckinley jtmckinley is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Farmington Hills, Michigan (near Detroit)
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Re: Hackers, Lamers and Script Kiddies

Quote:
Originally Posted by VAXman View Post
Market penetration/application (quantity) does not correlate into quality. McDonald's, by that metric, would be the best food in the universe. We can argue in another thread.
I wasn't referring to market penetration, Linux is still relatively low on that metric, but site user load does matter, not only is it a measure of scalability, but with the number of users likely trying to hack google and amazon, it does demonstrate that Linux can be made robust, even if the standard ubuntu or fedora or whatever distro isn't terribly robust "out of the box". I'd be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that both google and amazon use their own distros.

Quote:
Originally Posted by VAXman View Post
Layer upon that CRapache and then a gazillion lines of obfuscated scripts written by 14 yr. olds patting themselves on the back that what they've created is so cool that the application of sound software engineering principles would be unwarranted and sully their creative juju.
Well Crapache, as you call it, is also used to serve many high volume sites (maybe more than any other HTTP server) and can be made robust, but probably not by using scripts/configs made by 14 year olds, same as above.

Quote:
Originally Posted by VAXman View Post
NO CODE whatsoever should run on my systems unless I say it should run. Case closed. The problem is trying to explain to people that it doesn't have to be any other way is difficult because they haven't seen it any other way. It's like explaining the color orange to somebody blind from birth. There are concepts out there as revolutionary and evolutionary as the view of the world from Archimedes to Newton and Newton to Einstein.
OK, no argument there, but in case you aren't already aware, you can not only compile your own linux kernel and disable anything you don't want, but you can in fact create your own linux distribution so that you know exactly what is running and/or installed on the box. You can even compile the whole distro from source if you want so you can set all the make parameters. It's a lot of work and I doubt you have the time or inclination (I considered doing it once but decided I didn't want to deal with it), but in case you are interested here's a couple links that describe how to do it:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/...questid=170220

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

There are other HOWTOs as well, a google search for "roll your own linux distro" will yield many, but the infoweek one describes using an existing distro to start. Linux From Scratch is the whole enchilada and is referenced by the infoweek article also. Another option is BSD which builds from source by default and is the base of OS X IIRC, maybe you'd prefer that. I dunno if it's really worth it to roll your own, there are good distros out there that can be made secure, we use SUSE for our servers at work I think, but it is an option.

Not trying to make more work for ya bro, I really appreciate what you do for us on the Moon, just passing along the info.
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