rootninja

Here’s yet another good reason to think about breaking free from your mental slavery to microsoft. clarkn0va wrote in a reply on slashdot to the http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/21/2317222&from=rss” alt=”US-CERT Says Microsoft’s Advice On Downadup Worm Bogus”>US-CERT Says Microsoft’s Advice On Downadup Worm Bogus article:

>> If you put these types on OSX or Linux they would break just as much as they do on Windows.

You had me up to that line. I have managed 4 desktop computers at a youth drop-in center for a year and a half now. We have all three of your types using these machines on a nightly basis.

On my first day all four computers ran xp Home with the youth using just the guest account. All four computers were heavily infested with you-name-it. The hard drives never stopped churning and the router lights never stopped blinking, 30 minutes after logging out.

I spent that first evening exorcising the demons on what appeared to be the worst of the four stations. I gave it a clean bill of health, tightened up security here and there, and called it a night. I decided that night that I would clean out one machine per week.

I went back for round 2 a week later and the one I had cleaned the week previous was back to its original state.

I spoke to the management and obtained permission and funds to do some minor hardware upgrades on the office computer. All the hard drives got pulled from the youth computers and assembled into a RAID on the office computer, on which I did a fresh default install of Ubuntu and ltsp. I created an account for every youth that wanted one and told them to have fun. I even installed limewire and showed some of them how to grab torrents using deluge and transmission.

A year and a half later and not a single breakage. No pop-ups, no churning disks, no dead family of five. I’m effectively unemployed with this organization.

Go ahead and tell me that Windows can be made secure. Yeah, I know. I work in 3 schools and it’s all Windows or nothing, and the IT people (not me) have done a great job of locking things down and generally keeping things ticking. But that’s far from default configuration.

no, “these types”, the same ones who had 4 xp desks in a perpetually broken state, even with AV and limited accounts, haven’t broken a default linux install yet.