[ attribution broken, whom are you citing here Kurt? ] On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 01:55 -0600, Kurt Seifried wrote:
Everyone caring a little bit, should be able to recompile a kernel, and it is not very hard to learn, too. Distributors will _never_ be fast enough to rapair a kernel hole in reasonable time.
I must disagree on this point. Does everyone that drives a car know how to fix it?
It's nice to have an analogy everybody's familiar with. This raises recognition. :) Everyone that drives a car should either - know how to fix a breakage or - know a garage to go to in case the car breaks down or is going to instead of - waiting for the vendor to overhaul(id?) the model / series and ram the change down the customers' throats. When people only drive their car without any maintenance (no matter if done by themselves or done by a garage they pay), they have at least *contributed* when an accident happens. It boils down to "teach yourself or have your administration done by somebody who knows what to do". You do have an individual support contract for your installation, don't you? If not, you're doomed to wait for the vendor. And the vendor won't head for the quick and dirty fix as long as customers are screaming when their non typical setup breaks. As well as variety in possible setups delays testing. [ I don't talk to you specifically, Kurt. It's the audience "you". ]
Computers are horribly complex, most people quite simply don't have the time, expertise or want/need to learn, and they don't really need it to be honest. This is why we have tech support and IT staffers.
Exactly the point. If general distribution media doesn't satisfy your need in terms of response time and customization, talk to tech support people and use their offers.
I think Theo de Radt has a good quote on this "we don't want administrators to have to be security experts, that's why we ship OpenBSD secure by default".
This "secure by default" comes from disabling all the dangerous stuff. Add some usual functionality and boom! You have OpenBSD running and yet are not secure. And that's exactly what the OpenBSD community will tell you: You don't have a default setup (enabled services which are disabled by default, installed additional software, changed existing configuration) and so it's *your* fault when something happens. In fact there were people fleeing from OpenBSD because "the security had gotten on their nerves". :) The advantage doesn't come (in any distribution you could think of) from installing things, but from using them appropriately. (How many of these threads did we have already?) One of my favourite fortunes is pinned above my desk: "A fool with a tool is still a fool". That's not about telling unexperienced or overloaded people that they are fools. It's about the above "learn it" (luckily ignorance is something you can do something against) or "pay someone to do it for you". If you judge yourself you don't know and yet keep up this state and neither hand out this overwhelming job to somebody to handle it, don't moan if bad things happen ... virtually yours 82D1 9B9C 01DC 4FB4 D7B4 61BE 3F49 4F77 72DE DA76 Gerhard Sittig true | mail -s "get gpg key" Gerhard.Sittig@gmx.net -- If you don't understand or are scared by any of the above ask your parents or an adult to help you.