Re: Off topic- Your Favorite Linux Distro

["Kristofer T. Karas" <ktk () enterprise bidmc harvard edu>]

DeBerry, Casey wrote:

> We have decided to move our new linux installations from Redhat to 
> another distro..  As this is the only distro besides suse I have used 
> in the past, was curious to see what others are using.
> Basically, we like the Redhat update software, but are not willing to 
> pay for it...  Any of the other distro's using update software that 
> will bring packages up to date?


I dislike redhat because they tend to make gratuitous patches to 
commonly used system utilities without documenting how those break the 
behavior specified in the manual page.  (For example, their version of 
/bin/bash will silently ignore the output of piped '|' commands if 
stdin/stdout are network streams - took several hours of head scratching 
to find that one!)  And their whole system initialization process seems 
cumbersome.  As one attuned to the security industry, I prefer an OS 
that puts everything right up front hiding little if anything; for me, 
that means Slackware.

I have an auto-update facility I wrote (one script per application) that 
automatically goes off to the source website, checks for a newer 
distribution, downloads, compiles, configures and installs the new 
application.  That way, I don't have to wait for the OS vendor to get 
around to releasing a security patch (though Slackware seems pretty good 
in this regard).  My rule of thumb is that any piece of software that 
listens on an externally accessible port (or processes data read from 
same as part of a library) should be auto-updated; I have scripts for 
imapd, ldap, links, lynx, mysql, nessus, nmap, ntp, openssl, php, rsync, 
samba, sara, sendmail, net-snmp, snort, spamassassin, squid and ssh.  So 
far, seems to work for me.  :-)

Kris




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