Subject: Re: Can't get interfaces????
From: Tom Fitzgerald (tfitz@MIT.EDU)
Date: Tue Jul 25 2000 - 15:56:37 EDT
> Yeah, this is a known issue with RedHat 6.2, since the boneheads at RedHat
> felt it necessary to remove autoloading of the appletalk module as of 6.2
> (after all, saving these few bytes of extra configuration from a text file
> makes all the difference).
The Redhat people did exactly the right thing. The two boneheaded moves
were:
1) Enabling it by default in all versions prior to 6.2, and
2) Not publicizing it adequately in the release notes when they removed it.
Redhat has had a chronic problem of enabling every silly service and
driver that can possibly be enabled. This has caused waves of security
problems in every release, since a hole in the most insignificant package
affects everyone who hasn't explicitly turned it off (which nobody does).
It's actually very good that they're not enabling so many services by
default. This can only help the security of internet-accessible Linux
systems, which is right now terrible.
Most users don't use or need the Appletalk protocol, so it shouldn't be
there. The same is true of dozens of other packages that one can only
hope are also being disabled (which you won't notice since you don't use
them). Redhat enabled them so users wouldn't need to read docs to figure
out how to turn them on, so Redhat could claim that Linux is as admin-
friendly as Windows. Instead, it's like Windows because it's full of
security problems. The whole idea was flawed.
That being said, the removal should have been prominent in the release
notes.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Wed Jan 17 2001 - 14:31:37 EST