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I love SuSE, and thinks it's the best Distro available, yet, a disabled by default policy would IMHO be the best thing SuSE could ever do. As far as I'm concerned the only thing that should be enabled by default is sshd and _thats's_ even debatable. Face it, it's not going to make it any harder for your average desktop flunkie who want's to setup a kde box and browse the web. If they want to run a personal web server or ftp server then that _should_ know how to enable it from inetd.conf etc, or they should NOT be running the thing.
Prolly won't happen, as most users are more concerned about usability then security (simple fact of life).
I think the harden SuSE script, and SuSE firewall is brilliant, but half of the things harden_suse does should be _default_ not options available in an optional package in the sec series....
Shouldawouldcoulda but don't.
PLEASE PLEASE make a few simple changes to the defaults to help make SuSE the most secure Mainstream linux distro out there in.
I think a solid middle ground would be to ship something like bastille-linux (getting quite advanced especially with support from Mandrake), and really strongly urge users to run it. If you want secure by default use OpenBSD, personally I find a lot of issues with OpenBSD (no POP/IMAP server, they have had several remote root holes in dhcpd client and ftp, but they claim these are not "default"...). Kurt Seifried
Bah.. OpenBSD get's up my nose... almost as much as OpenBSD users do. Elitist bunch of F&*K&^R&. I have installed OBSD a few times and user it when I have to.... I think SuSE does it the _correct_ way, they have the suff there with all the config files, you just need to un comment out the bit you want. I just want a few more services disabled by default is all. I'd even settle for having things like apache running, just, please comment out more things in inetd.conf!!!!! Cheers Peter Nixon Senior Security Consultant IT Audit & Consulting (ITAC) Pty Ltd http://www.itaudit.com.au mailto:petern@itaudit.com.au