On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 13:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Tronn Wærdahl wrote:
Yum is removed for ovious reasons :-)
You hate security fixes?? I can't think of any other reason anyone would do that.
My biggest irritation with "appliances" is the lack of security updates. We have several print servers built into work where the Mfg has not released updates to fix apache, samba and windows RPC vulnerabilities because they are "appliances" and don't need to be updated.
I'm sorry, if it's connected to the network and has persistent writable memory like a hard drive I'm a bit worried that it could be used to perform network attacks if it has remote vulnerabilities.
Back in 2003 we had machines on the WAN infected with blaster and these were causing the print servers in house based on "Windows NT Embedded" to crash constantly. When I contacted the support for the copiers their reply was not to supply an update to the machines or send a tech out to update them themselves but to "fix your clients". Which was not very helpful seeing that 100% of the bad traffic was from outside our site because other sites had not patched their systems.
I will never recommend an "appliance" to anybody were it has externally accessible services and no way to patch it. Such things are disasters waiting to happen.
See the following article http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/03/27OPenterwin_1.html
Regards, Paul Berger