Re: [vox-tech] [john_zie_99@yahoo.com: help needed]

["Mark K. Kim" <mkMAPSkim@ucdavis.edu>]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

> security is a process, not a state of being.  consider a dumb openbsd admin
> and a smart linux admin and guess who has the more secure server?

That argument assumes the "admin" is a variable.  In our case, the "admin"
is a constant (ie - John Zie) and the operating system is the variable
(which Linux, Linux vs. BSD, etc.)  Given this situation, I argue that BSD
is a more secure choice because of its background (see others' postings).

In short, given a dumb admin I'd rather have OpenBSD than Linux.  Given a
smart admin, I'd still feel safer with OpenBSD than Linux.

> there are also other issues.   linux SMP is lightyears ahead of bsd.

I wouldn't say it's lightyears ahead -- Linux had virtually no SMP support
until a few years back.  I remember discussing with Ajay about Linus
delving into SMP when we were sophomores or so.  (BTW, you know the
lightyear is a unit of physical distance, not time... :)

> the only linux compatibility benchmarks i've seen come from bsd developers,

Well... that's because people running Linux aren't interested in running
Linux apps in BSD... 'cause we're running Linux already :P

Adding Linux support under BSD wouldn't be hard... at least on the x86
platform.  All functionality of Linux already exists on BSD (protected
mode, unix system calls, compatible hardware and /dev, etc.), and all
Linux system calls are made through INT80h, which means all Linux system
calls go through a single point in the system thus can be trapped and
translated to BSD calls very easily.  So with a little effort, there
wouldn't be much overhead at all... (I think.)

> who have shown themselves to be ... well, wierdos.

I'm sure we seem pretty weird to them, too... :)

-Mark

---
Mark K. Kim
http://www.cbreak.org/mark/
PGP key available upon request.