[SunRescue] Speaking of SGI equipment...

[Dave McGuire]

On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, ward at zilla.nu wrote:
>> Security is an attribute of a systems administrator, not an operating system.
>
>Only when the system itself isn't full of holes.  If the system's services are
>succeptable to buffer overruns, the sysadmin can't do much about it.

  I beg to differ.  I've fixed many such holes, as have my coworkers and
friends in the business.  If OS source isn't available (and it almost always
is, depending on how anal one is about licensing issues and how careful one is
about giving it to one's friends) then oa sysadmin can replace pretty much any
non-proprietary system service software on a modern Unix-based box.  From
portmap to inetd to lpd to telnet...the stuff is out there, and it's accessible.

>Actually, it's not plain old X, it's a heavily modified X.  Their X isn't the

  Sure it's got drivers for their hardware and *lots* of extensions...but it
speaks the X11 protocol in a standards-compliant way.  Pretty much ANY window
manager can be used with it.  That was my point, and that's what I meant by
"plain old X"...

>problem, though, it's the desktop/wm/etc.  I agree that it sucks a lot of cycles
>and RAM, but it's kinda pretty.  When the Indigo first shipped, we called it a
>blue NeXT, 'cause of the little menubar on the top left, as well as the media
>features.  Of course, we were paying a lot less for the NeXTs..

  Yup. :-)

>>   Give it a shot...I'm running Enlightenment on one of my SGI systems.  Took
>> all of five minutes to switch over after getting it built.
>
>E is another memory and CPU hog, but it's nothing compared to what SGi wants you
>to use.  I like E.

  Me too.

           -Dave McGuire