On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 09:07:13PM +0000, Stephen Patterson wrote:
On 02 Aug 02, Dennis Tuchler (dtuchler@earthlink.net) wrote:
I have just run into some static with the powers that be in my place of employment with respect to my use of Linux rather than Windows. I am connected to a University network. There is also an internal LAN that serves my school only. The other computers in this operation, all on Windows, are connected by default through the University network to that LAN.
Should be no problem, *technically*... Socially, well there's always the fear of the unknown... :-\
The fear is that my computer is a potential server for the LAN and therefore poses a security problem. I find this strange, but have no way of refuting it.
Well, "server" *is* a pretty broad term. What exactly is it that they're concerned about?
Even a windows computer can be a potential server (IIS, Apache for windows...) It is just a matter of what sofware you have installed and whether you have a local firewall blocking locaal servers.
If you have an http server running, f.x, then that's certainly no problem for the network. (Unless of course you'd be serving big popular files that everyone on the local net access all the time, thus hogging bandwidth) My hunch is that what the Powers fear, is that you could inadvertently be running dchp or dns or some other network 'configuration' service. Or that by some insane windows logic, the other clients on the lan should all suddenly think that your machine is their gateway... or... or... But basically you should check which services *are* running, and turn off anything 'inappropriate'. What version system are you using? I think we need to know a little more about what exactly the Powers' concerns are, before we can ease their minds...? Just as an aside; At the school where I read up to the LPIC-1 tests, I too was the lone linux user. Initially I was met with the same kind of 'concern' that my box could pose a 'problem' for the network. Of course it didn't, and after a while some of the techs even got kind of interested in the system :) The only real 'problem' with having that box in a M$ network was that no matter what I tried, the Exchange server would *not* accept connections, and consequently I could not use the school mail system... This forced me to ssh to an outside server in order to use mail. But hey, that's when I took my first baby steps with Mutt, so actually it was kind of a bonus ;D HTH Jon Clausen