Am 29.06.2015 um 19:40 schrieb Gordon Messmer <gordon.messmer at gmail.com>: > On 06/29/2015 06:46 AM, Sorin Srbu wrote: >> Even considering a minimal CentOS install, is that still less minimal than >> e.g. Smoothwall or Ipcop? > > Yes, a minimal install of CentOS is probably larger (less minimal) than a specialized distribution. our dedicated DNS systems are minimal without effort (234 packages / 1,1GB total), with more effort we could reduce it under 1GB (logfiles are included). >> In my world, security has a price and, and that might be the need to learn >> another distro in order to minimize security issues (and maybe as in this >> case minimize attack-surfaces). > > When all of your systems are one OS, you can more easily build an infrastructure that provides backups, security and bug fix updates, monitoring, etc for all of your systems. Specialized devices are often left out when admins set up infrastructure to provide those services for their primary systems. That's one way that a general purpose OS can be significantly better than a specialized OS. +1 -- LF