Re: Linux Firewall

On Mon, 29 May 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.security, in article
<slrne7kh50.5j5.john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, John Thompson wrote:

On 2006-05-28, Moe Trin <ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The real problem that the README doesn't discuss is security. These
distributions have not been patched for updates that occurred even
during their supported life.

Aye, there's the rub.

Maybe NetBSD would be a better option.

I dunno - NetBSD is supposed to have a wide list of hardware supported and
version 3 is supposed to be available, but there seems to be limited users.
Looking at my news spool log (I follow comp.unix.bsd.*.misc), there have
only been 144 articles in comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc thus far this year
compared to 606 for OpenBSD, 4273 for FreeBSD, and 5 for BSDI. My limited
experience with NetBSD suggests the amount of packages available is much
less than any Linux, or FreeBSD. Both FreeBSD and OpenBSD have had recent
releases of new versions.

I haven't really paid attention to the small Linux distributions. At one
time, 'Baslinux' (a.k.a. 'BasicLinux') claimed to require 2 Megs, as did
'Damnsmall Linux' and 'Small Linux'. 'cLIeNUX' wanted 4 Megs. As with any
small O/S, these are much more austere than the "popular" distributions.
The old jokes about EMACS (depending on how old your are, {Eight|Eighty|
Eighthundred} Megs And Continuously Swapping) being a great operating
system that only lacked a decent text editor, the current crop of
windoze wannabe desktops are also a huge RAM sinkhole. Running something
OTHER THAN Gnome or KDE (there really is a large choice available) would
also reduce the enormous memory required.

Old guy
.

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