Exactly. This is the part that gets me. While I'm not disputing that there are costs involved in malware containment or prevention, they should not be nearly as high as the main article describes. If Manchester had simply patched its computers when the patch was released, they never would have this problem with Conficker to begin with. The article says that it hit the city in February, a full FOUR MONTHS after the patch was released. There's simply no excuse for that. I work in a giant corporate machine, and even we get patches pushed out to 10's of thousands of Windows machines faster than that. The cost of prevention is far lower than the cost of reaction most of the time. So while I agree that it's a cost that needs to be factored in, I have a very difficult time believing that it's as high as some of you are making it out to be.
Keep in mind, patching systems to prevent exploits is not something that is limited to Windows either. It's something you should do for ALL operating systems, regardless of the security model or other factors. If you aren't keeping your Linux install and FOSS software updated, you're putting yourself at risk just the same as on a Windows system. Don't ever fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
And for the record, I'm a Linux user (and a huge fan of Linux to boot) as well as a Windows user. So this isn't coming from someone who doesn't like Linux. I'm simply attempting to give it a more objective viewpoint.
Oh I definitely wouldn't use NFS by itself as there are no backups then. In that I agree completely. The only problem with using rsync by itself is that you either have to run it almost continuously or live with the fact that there will be periodic differences. Using NFS ensures that all home directories are always identical, and then having an rsync backup at an interval adequate to your usage provides the redundancy you're talking about in case of disaster.
As someone else pointed out somewhere else in these comments, it's probably best to not try to use one tool to accomplish everything. It's both a blessing and a curse that most tools for Linux are very specialized. Each does something very well, but you don't typically find the "one size fits all" solutions either. Set up a combination of tools that provides you with all the functionality you need and you'll be completely satisfied.
If NFS is hacking, then cool. I'm a hacker! Sorta...:)
And I hadn't seen the post you were replying to, hence my failure to understand the full context. Sorry about that.:)
And when the server hosting your NFS share dies, so does your entire home directory on every PC. Check and mate.
It's not necessarily as world-ending as you make it sound. I use NFS to mount home directories as well as a couple others. I also have redundant hard drives on the Linux server, and each night rsync makes the backup drive a mirror image of the main drive. I could schedule that to run more often, but I don't change things often enough to make more than once a day necessary. If the main hard drive dies, I can very quickly and easily switch over to the backup drive temporarily until I get a new drive with all the data on it. If the server itself dies, it wouldn't take significant time to get it set back up. The only way I'm really stuck is if the main OS hard drive (separate drive altogether) dies, and even that only keeps me without my home directory for a week tops. For some applications, that may be too long, but in those cases you could simply have the rsync nightly backup also copy everything to a backup directory on a second server that could be your backup NFS host. The main article said that the user has two Linux servers at his disposal right now, so that could easily work. It would take all of about 5 minutes to get the backup server to point/home to the backup directory and get NFS shares on the laptop to point to the new NFS host. If all you're looking for is syncing between hosts, NFS is the way to go. If you're looking for versioning too, then it may not fit the bill quite as well.
It downloads the final chunk needed to play the game, you simply cannot play HL2 without downloading a lot of stuff first even if you have the CD
It does not download the final chunk. If you bought the game on disc (as I did), the ENTIRE game is on the discs. What it's doing over the internet is decrypting the game files, which DOES NOT require downloading gigabytes or even hundreds of megabytes of data. If you can't connect to Steam, the decryption process doesn't work, but the only reason it's downloading anything for the CD install of Half-Life 2 is to update it.
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Exactly. This is the part that gets me. While I'm not disputing that there are costs involved in malware containment or prevention, they should not be nearly as high as the main article describes. If Manchester had simply patched its computers when the patch was released, they never would have this problem with Conficker to begin with. The article says that it hit the city in February, a full FOUR MONTHS after the patch was released. There's simply no excuse for that. I work in a giant corporate machine, and even we get patches pushed out to 10's of thousands of Windows machines faster than that. The cost of prevention is far lower than the cost of reaction most of the time. So while I agree that it's a cost that needs to be factored in, I have a very difficult time believing that it's as high as some of you are making it out to be.
Keep in mind, patching systems to prevent exploits is not something that is limited to Windows either. It's something you should do for ALL operating systems, regardless of the security model or other factors. If you aren't keeping your Linux install and FOSS software updated, you're putting yourself at risk just the same as on a Windows system. Don't ever fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
And for the record, I'm a Linux user (and a huge fan of Linux to boot) as well as a Windows user. So this isn't coming from someone who doesn't like Linux. I'm simply attempting to give it a more objective viewpoint.
Oh I definitely wouldn't use NFS by itself as there are no backups then. In that I agree completely. The only problem with using rsync by itself is that you either have to run it almost continuously or live with the fact that there will be periodic differences. Using NFS ensures that all home directories are always identical, and then having an rsync backup at an interval adequate to your usage provides the redundancy you're talking about in case of disaster.
As someone else pointed out somewhere else in these comments, it's probably best to not try to use one tool to accomplish everything. It's both a blessing and a curse that most tools for Linux are very specialized. Each does something very well, but you don't typically find the "one size fits all" solutions either. Set up a combination of tools that provides you with all the functionality you need and you'll be completely satisfied.
If NFS is hacking, then cool. I'm a hacker! Sorta... :)
And I hadn't seen the post you were replying to, hence my failure to understand the full context. Sorry about that. :)
And when the server hosting your NFS share dies, so does your entire home directory on every PC. Check and mate.
It's not necessarily as world-ending as you make it sound. I use NFS to mount home directories as well as a couple others. I also have redundant hard drives on the Linux server, and each night rsync makes the backup drive a mirror image of the main drive. I could schedule that to run more often, but I don't change things often enough to make more than once a day necessary. If the main hard drive dies, I can very quickly and easily switch over to the backup drive temporarily until I get a new drive with all the data on it. If the server itself dies, it wouldn't take significant time to get it set back up. The only way I'm really stuck is if the main OS hard drive (separate drive altogether) dies, and even that only keeps me without my home directory for a week tops. For some applications, that may be too long, but in those cases you could simply have the rsync nightly backup also copy everything to a backup directory on a second server that could be your backup NFS host. The main article said that the user has two Linux servers at his disposal right now, so that could easily work. It would take all of about 5 minutes to get the backup server to point /home to the backup directory and get NFS shares on the laptop to point to the new NFS host. If all you're looking for is syncing between hosts, NFS is the way to go. If you're looking for versioning too, then it may not fit the bill quite as well.
It downloads the final chunk needed to play the game, you simply cannot play HL2 without downloading a lot of stuff first even if you have the CD
It does not download the final chunk. If you bought the game on disc (as I did), the ENTIRE game is on the discs. What it's doing over the internet is decrypting the game files, which DOES NOT require downloading gigabytes or even hundreds of megabytes of data. If you can't connect to Steam, the decryption process doesn't work, but the only reason it's downloading anything for the CD install of Half-Life 2 is to update it.