Technology: December 2006 Archives

(Written in April 2005, but never published)

At home, I am planning to set up a file server. The only other thing this machine will do is act as a printer server so my wife and I can share the printer without any cable swapping. If I could have gotten a new Mac mini, I would have done so. My wife and I have been impressed and very happy with her PowerBook, but my budget was “as little money as possible.” So I asked around for an old machine I could get for free, and then explored my options as to what OS to use.

Of course my budget eliminated any newer Windows from consideration, and I didn’t really want to use my old copy of Windows 95, so I settled very quickly on BSD or Linux.

I’ve used OpenBSD before and been very pleased with it. But Linux seems to have more momentum, so I put it in contention. But I didn’t want just any version of Linux. I use Suse Linux at work and have used Red Hat in the past. I’m not too impressed with either of them as far as a server goes. Being somewhat of a security and simplicity freak, I didn’t want to have anything installed except what I actually needed to share my printer and my files.

After a lot of reading, CRUX became my primary Linux candidate. OpenBSD, of course, is well know for it’s security. I recently read that the Honeynet Project, a group devoted to “learn[ing] the tools, tactics, and motives of the blackhat community”, has determined that the life expectancy of a default Linux install on the Internet is growing, and is often measured in months. Some versions of Windows are compromised in minutes. And OpenBSD? The headline from their homepage reads: “Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years.” They measure themselves in available security holes, whereas Linux and Windows are measured in security violations as the holes themselves are too numerous to count.