Operating System

[Drey]

I personally use SuSE.

I've tried FreeBSD, Debian, and Mandrake, (not to include the various Windows OS's I've seen)

and run a network at work of various Windows NT, 98, 2k, and Mandrake clients.

[simon]

Re: Rich Kids

Actually I think I just read somewhere that an MIT or maybe Harvard student got bust for pocession of heroin. He went to the police station to have it tested to see if it was legit stuff. It was and they busted his ass.

So HEH!#@

[Xp0nential]

MIT guys

Actually not all MIT students are rich as you portray.
A lot of them are funded by governments and a lot of them receive help from MIT.
I actually read somewhere on the MIT EE page, that if you get accepted to their college . If you have difficulty paying the tuition they will help you find money to pay it <-- I wouldn't find that weird.
later

[simon]

I think that goes without saying. Most all colleges will help you out. But MIT still cost a bazillion dollars. Literally.

[Xp0nential]

yes but still I wouldn't mind being there

[binarybandito]

FreeBSD

I have been using FreeBSD for about a year, and I must say I love it beyond words. I had been using Linux for a few years before that, but I find that while using an almost entirely Monolithic kernel like FreeBSD does you will surely take a performance hit, I find that configuring said kernel was a breeze. It didn't "detect" all of my hardware on installation, but anything it didn't find I compiled into the kernel with no problem. I love the way the /etc and /dev are laid out, and I find the filesystem to be much more user friendly than any linux distro I've ever used.

One thing ive noticed is that FreeBSD (I'm using a year old 4.3, they have newer releases now) is not as stable as Linux, and although it has yet to crash on me, it does give me kernel error messages every now and then. If I was a security person (I don't do computers for a living) I would definitely go with Linux, but as an end user, I find FreeBSD beats Linux hands down (I'm sure all the defcon people are laughing at me now, fuck off).

I also have Plan9 on a partition, and admittedly I downloaded it, but from what I've seen, it sucks shit. It crashes on me a million times a day, I can't seem to make anything work, I can't even add new users, so I have to use the defaults. I'm sure if you actually bought a Plan9 distro it would be a lot better, and I'm sure if I knew more about it it would also be alot better, but I haven't found a single thing I like about Plan9, other than that certain horny feeling you get from using a new, fucked up OS and trying to figure it out.

I use win98 simply because my parents have an AOL account that I can use, and I couldn't afford internet access, but when I start going to school and they have their own network which is routed to the internet, you can be assured that every last trace of this piece of shit OS will be eliminated from my machine, which I treat as a holy shrine. My shrine is unpure, and needs to be cleansed, but for now I will wait.
Binary Bandito

[russ]

Ugh

Are you serious? hahaha Unpure? Cleansed? heh

[binarybandito]

Oh yeah, baby

----Shadows creep into scene. Menacing music rises....---

Binary Bandito: "Oh I'm serious. More serious than you could ever know."

---In one swift, fluid motion the Binary Bandito presses non-descript looking button on the keyboard and russ explodes in a flurry of blood and tissue.---

Binary Bandito: "Mess with the best, die with the rest."

---Camera pans to mountain top, with Binary Bandito on the peak, sun setting in background.---

Binary Bandito: "m3 31337 H4x0r #1!!!!!!!."

---Fade to black with "Chariots of Fire" playing in background.---

Note from the Director-
This is just the beginning of a script for a movie I am writing about the battle between me and "russ" after his snotty little response. As you may remember, my post was about FreeBSD and my distaste for Windows. Anyway, the short answer to your question, russ, is yes. Very serious.
To view the rest of the script, visit
https://www.dontfuckwithboysfromnewh...oubastards.net

[opcom]

The only thing pure..

is a VAX!

or maybe a pdp-8

here go d/l this 280MB avi file:

http://208.190.133.201/decimages/pdp8rescue.avi

but beware it's a 384K dsl, so there'll be a wait..

[russ]

HAHA

Chariots of fire... nice touch.

[JonathanJames]

I used OpenBSD to set up a combined router/fw/portbouncer on my prior company's DMZ. Incredibly simple and speedy installation and maintainance, easy to strip down and very robust. I setup the system with strict fw-rules, denied all traffic except to BIND UDP, webtraffic (80) and SMTP. All of the service software was located on internally mapped servers (NAT) and strictly regulated so that only certified service traffic was allowed out.
I ran qmail as a mailprovider, a modified BIND as DNS, a stripped down Apache as a webprovider with no modules of any kind installed. I moved all the crucial binaries onto a CD and deleted them from the web/dns/mail and router. When needed I just inserted the CD and mounted it.
All traffic in and out of the system was also carefully monitored by a loganalyzer that we developed with a neurological IntrusionDetection Engine algorithm which also implemented blocking rules onto hosts that frequently tried to exploit/D.o.S our services.

We received about 500 intrusion attempts/D.oS'es per day for a period of approx. 1½ years. We nearly never rebooted the machines and never needed to either.

Just my $0.01...

Sincerely,
Jonathan