Corporate Anti-Virus strategies

dsr at tao.merseine.nu dsr at tao.merseine.nu
Fri Aug 15 12:30:58 EDT 2003


On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 11:20:15AM -0400, Duane Morin wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:
> > Counterargument: Red Hat and Debian, among others, provide single-source
> > fixes.
> 
> Is this valid in general, so for isntance if the user was handed a CD with 
> Knoppix or Gentoo on it would they still have a single-source of fixes 
> available to them?  Or is it strictly for the big distributions?

Knoppix is a special case: it's built off of Debian, so Debian fixes
apply. Gentoo is now big enough to have their own fixes available.

Now, the smaller distros may not have timely fixes; this is a big reason
to go with Debian, RH, SuSE, etc... 

And the tiniest distros are very small collections designed to do
specific things: be firewalls, be micro-web-servers, and so forth. They
generally get quick updates because there isn't that much to watch.

> > Counterargument: 100 small holes vs 1 or 2 large ones? You haven't been
> > reading Bugtraq. 
> 
> Should I be?  Or will I be inundated?  I'm no sysadmin, just a user (and 
> occasional writer).  I don't know what your statement means.  Just to 
> clarify my own terminology by "large" hole I was thinking "Of the sort 
> that makes the evening news."  

If you substitute "business pages of the Globe and technical news sites
for non-technical people" for "evening news" then yes, MS has several
large holes each month.

Bugtraq may not be useful to you, as it does try to cover *everything*,
but reading the archives for a week would certainly be useful for your
education as a technology writer.

-dsr-

-- 
Network engineer / pre-sales engineer available in the Boston area.
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr



More information about the Discuss mailing list