Re: Apples / osX

[Paul Day <paulday () toll com au>]

On Thu, 8 Sep 2005, McKinley, Jackson wrote:
> Wondering if anyone has / does use a Mac for there "toolkit" laptop?

Sure do - and noticing more and more Unix/Network Security/Admin people
are.

> With osX being UNIX "based" and from what I can see some of the more
> popular stuff should port with a little work.

s/"some"/"just about all". All my favourite Open-source tools will compile
on Mac OS X no problems. If you want a decent packaging environment, fink
is based on Debian's dpkg and is great if you want to keep your tools
up-to-date.

> Before I went and spent couple of K on a new power book I was wondering
> if anyone had already tried?  What setbacks? What works well?  What
> software have you found?

Set-backs - Apple's marketting would lead you to beleive OS X is
bomb-proof. It's far from that so it's a good idea to secure it youself,
especially if you're doing audits of other people's sensitive data! I
wrote a white-paper on Securing Mac OS 10.3
(http://www.bur.st/~paul/securing_mac_os_x.pdf) which might be a start
although please note that current Macs ship with the new 10.4 - Google
will give you the rest.

Cheers,
Paul