Stefan Suurmeijer wrote:
On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Alex W Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes wrote:
i've been following this discussion and i agree with both sides of the argument. however, the question is what is the easiest way to educate the users and make them aware of the choices that they are choosing during the installation of the operating system.
Agreed!
currently we have a situation where the user can select the 'style' of installation that they choose when they perform the installation (all, minimal, server etc etc), but it might help raise the user awareness of what is being installed if there was a _short_ readme linked into each of the installations that would detail what issues are connected with the installation and what would actually be installed by default. in this way the newbies could make a more 'educated' guess as to which installation they want and would be less surprised when somebody exploits a service that they where already running (without their knowledge).
What about just 3 default styles of network installation? Open: all services (or almost all) enabled, standard: just the most used (even if that includes telnet etc) and safe: just the safe services (ssh et all). That would mean including 3 versions of inetd.conf and rc.config, each with a short description of the differences/potential problems. That
good in theory but... Say, you select "secure inetd" and you select "Apache". secure inetd will close port 80. Apache needs port 80. Hmmm. Either Apache would auto select "less secure inetd.conf" or apache / httpd / THE HELP SYSTEM would not work. Lot's of fun for the newbe that sais "I want it secure, but why does help not work" The above is not the best example, I know, just: There will always be contradicting stuff in a system setup. It remains: brains are not delivered with the distro. ;-( But I also like some more description for these services, examples for what they are good. If they cannot deliver brains, they should make it easier for us, that havn't yet found their brains by giving better information. I hope yast2 will develope that way.
seems possible without much work from SuSE, and would give those of us who are security-minded a breather from having to disable all services ourselves, while still catering to the user who doesn't know what a daemon is (of course it would be nicer still to be able to select each seperate service at install time via a simple Yes/No dialog with a short description).
Other than that I'd have to agree with Thomas that it's easier (if annoying) for us to disable what we don't want (and let's face it, whatever default configuration SuSE ships, we are going to change it anyway) than it is for newbies to enable what they don't even know they need. Just add a very big warning to the install procedure that to have a safe system they should RTFM! ;-)
I think education for securety is needed. The truth is very sad, there is only one secure behaviour and that is paranoid. ;-( Juergen
Stefan
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