Slashdot Mirror
Desktop Linux Sliding in Under the Radar?
Paul Johnson asks: "This article at ComputerWorld describes a sysadmin's discovery that many people in his company are installing Linux on their desktops without consulting IT. The writer is concerned with the security implications, but there is a wider issue. At present the 'official' penetration of Linux into the desktop market is something around 1%. The writer of this article doesn't give figures, but it sounds like he may have stumbled on several times that percentage of desktop Linux installations. If so then this is an important trend. Linux got its foot in the datacentre door in exactly the same way a few years ago, with unofficial installations doing odd server jobs.
If you are a sysadmin, in an organization that runs Windows on the desktop, have you stumbled on many unofficial Linux installations?"
I have sores all over my dick. How many other developers out there have sores on their dicks. This could be a huge trend, oh my god, write to all the medical journals, developers have sores on their dicks.
...nothing.
My lord you know what this means?
/joeyo
2^5
Another low UID! Cool. Somehow, we've remembered old passwords, and still haven't been driven off.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I can't believe I got marked as flamebait. Shoot, I even have my email address in my profile. Why doesn't the moderator email me and ask?
What I said was true, and I'll repost it here:
I'm the IT guy at my (small) company (I also wear many other hats around here). Anyway, my job is to do the following: support everyone else in what they are doing.
When people buy machines, they don't go through me. They have to justify it through the accounting guy. I only get involved if they don't know how to set it up on the network. In fact, I usually don't know about computer purchases until _after_ they've arrived.
The reason? People use what they need to get the job done. That's not my business. My business is to help all the computers talk to each other so that we are more productive.
The threat facing companies is not someone installing their own OS on the computer. The threat is every person who doesn't know about computers running Outlook.
We run Windows 9x, 2000, XP, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and RHL here, and I just keep Appletalk, NFS, and SMB running on the server, as well as DHCP.
I have never seen a company with a truly secure intranet - most of them are just appearances of security. To have a truly secure intranet it requires that you implement security policies that waste time and productivity. When severe security policies are implemented, the users just go around them, making it even more secure than if there were lax protocols.
Case in point - the _big_ company I used to work for kept all of their root passwords for their UNIX machines in an access database that was available on the intranet, and on several desktops. I'm sure they had access restrictions on the file, but really, trusting SMB for every server's root password? Putting them all in the same file, in an Access database, where many users copied it locally to their own hard drive?
If you don't believe me, email me and I'll tell you which company I'm referring to.
Engineering and the Ultimate