Good Samaritans Choose Linux

blowdart writes "According to this article on the BBC news site the charity Samaritans has chosen Linux to provide it with more secure and powerful computer systems. The installation was supplied by Trustix with IBM providing network security. 'One of the great challenges for computing in any charity is to provide more for less,' said Mike Hermon, Information Systems Manager at Samaritans. According to the Trustix press release the installation is limited to security hardware only, "Samaritans is installing a four zone Trustix Firewall on an IBM eServer x305 and a Trustix Proxy Server on an IBM eServer x300 server.'" Oddly enough, today's Word A Day is Good Samaritan.

Comments

LWN article

[Karamchand]

Perhaps you are also interested in reading this press release/article on Linux Weekly News.
Just FYI :-)

Re:At long last, someone starts making sense.

[ddriver]

Because out of the box Trustix is strictly CLI and has only packages that they feel are secure. They try to keep it as simple as they can. The thing that I like the most is when there is a security patch (remember the BIND bug a few weeks ago?) one command later and it is fixed (I also got some Apache fixes that I had forgotten to do.......) Just clean and simple. Easy to keep Locked down.

Re:Quick Question

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

The Samaritans were a sort of Jewish half-breed in the ancient middle east. Samaritans were often looked down upon by Jews as second-class types. So to them, the term "Samaritan" would have already had a negative connotation, with no qualifier such as "Bad." In the biblical story, Jesus' point was that the two upstanding Jews passed by the wounded man but the Samaritan aided him, so the Samaritan was the good one and the other two were not, though common perception was the other way around.

I guess that saying "Good Samaritan" is actually a bit of a disservice, since it could suggest that Samaritans are normally otherwise -- which was the prejudice that Jesus pointing out as false.

Re:But the Samaritans take their name from the Bib

[Draoi]

Trolling or being blatantly sarcastic, whatever ...

http://www.samaritans.org/know/about_principles.sh tm

Seven principles

7. Samaritan volunteers are forbidden to impose their own convictions or to influence callers in regard to politics, philosophy or religion.

'nuff said.

Re:One quarter?

[N3WBI3]

I am wondering if they mean one quarter of server operating systems, that is a little more likely to be true. This article is not real news, they are using Linux for their firewall and proxy whcih, are area that linux has had no trouble. Somebody wake me when they start to have articles like this about linux on the desktop...

Regards

Re:/. sensationalism

[blowdart]

Actually it's the BBC that is being sensationalist. The quote is from the BBC article, which was why I balanced it with the "truth" from Trustux's press release.

A press release telling the truth? Oh the irony

Re:But the Samaritans take their name from the Bib

[DrXym]

The Samaritans have nothing to do with religion, the name is just an indication of the service they provide - solace and comfort to strangers. Primarily they are a suicide hotline but they accept all kinds of calls.