culture of *NIX

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> [mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us]On Behalf Of Eric
> Richardson
> Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 5:58 PM
> To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> Subject: Re: culture of *NIX
>
>
> "der.hans" wrote:
> >
> > moin, moin,
> >
> > while I'm at LJ's web site, here's another article I was wanting to
> > post. This one's online, so I can drop in a URL :).
> >
> > http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue84/4553.html
> >
> > Just a slightly different way to view the 'hacker culture'.
>
> Thanks for the pointer. I enjoyed this also.
> Eric :-)
---
The thing that I liked was the "Long Now guidelines". That's why I cringe
when see people trashing Microsoft on the message boards. I think that their
success and boldness in license fees gave life to and continues to nourish
the 'movement.'

However, I did lose a customer 2 weeks ago. He had a linux firewall that had
worked flawlessly for over a year - the only callback that I had on it was
to change the IP address for his DSL connection when he changed floors in
the high rise.

Then one day, the logs stop and I get a call from him that his very young
web programmer needs help configuring their new Windows 2000 system, which
turns out to be a pirated copy of Windows 2000 Advanced Server. This kid
didn't have a clue what this linux box was or did. After talking to this
kid, I wrote him an angry letter to the guy that I considered a friend
telling him that this particular decision was so monumentally dumb that I
saw no future in working with him. Apparently they couldn't use Microsoft
Netmeeting and wanted to hang their database directly on this computer (with
credit card info no less) on this server, use Windows Internet Connection
Sharing, Exchange Server (I wouldn't hazard a guess how he plans to get
around the licensing issue on this) and what he's going to do to protect
this from attack is anybody's guess. Anyway, I sent him the log from the
last day of monitor (which I did without charge) that had 1 megabyte worth
of REJECTED packets for the week and suggested that his kid concentrate on
finding ways to stop all that.

I guess the point that I ultimately want to make is that maybe the unix has
social engineering but there is an underlying fact that people fear what
they don't understand. If I had been over there maintaining this system, I
might have been pitching other things that he could do with the box (or
boxes like it).

I would really like to take an office completely into open source because I
know it can be done, should be done in governmental offices, non-profits and
any business that is starting up and doesn't have a major investment in
Microsoft specific application features - I think the major weakness here is
'presentation' software. Does anyone know of purely linux offices in the
valley?

Craig