On Sun, Apr 22, 2007 at 11:16:12AM +1000, Horst G?nther Burkhardt III wrote:
Uhhm, you're talking about downloading the updates/repodata/*.xml.gz files? For the 10.2 updates that's about 13MB currently. I'd be very interested to hear how you download that over a dialup at a realistic 3kbyte/s in "a few seconds tops".
Well, Herr Kuhlmann, have you ever considered that the average dialup user wouldn't be stupid enough to try applying remote updates over his link? Unless he was incredibly desperate not to have his Apache server hacked XD
Almost ALL computers these days have a broadband connection of some form. Yes, I'm not proud that I used a 33.6k modem up until January 19 2006, but one of the first things i did on my broadband link was download a new distro (i'd been using Fedora Core 4, and as you can imagine it traumatised me for life.) - There's just NO excuse to use a dial-in narrowband data link for anything more than ssh these days. Cheap and plentiful data pipes are available in every developed country of the world - EMBRACE THEM! :D
by the by, 13MB on my cable modem? it's demolished in one minute.
Hmm, apart from being rather arrogant this answer is also excessivly
ingorant of security matters because, what is says boils down to
"if you are sitting behind a small bandwidth connection (GPRS, modem,
ISDN, UMTS) it's OK to connect to the internet but don't download
(security) patches."
It also fails to take into account users that have to pay for the volume
that they use. While it may well be worthwile to download (and pay for
the volume) the delta-rpms to have a properly secured Suse the question
is: Why should I pay multiple times that volume just to know that my
system needs/doesn't need patches. I think it is good practice to check
for patches once per day and when comparing the download volume to the
checking overhead, the current situation looks bad.
In my case, I have a limit of 100 MB per month, after that the megabytes
become rather expensive. If I'm on business trips for two weeks, then
I'll use up almost all of that volume just to do the checks for updates.
Not a very nice solution.
ciao
Joerg
--
Joerg Mayer