My OS is better than YOUR OS

Yup, you got it, run as little as you can with root privs :)

And as for my machines, well, this is what we have:

We have a tech room in our new house, the walls are black, and neon green binary is starting to go on the walls. The ceiling will soon have green rope lights around the whole thing to add to coolness effect. And also we have the wall mounted CD/DVD holders from Ikea, two on each side of the room, one black, one green to match the walls.

On My side of the room where my machines are, the desk has an HP Pavilion with a Pentium 3 running at 733 MHz, with 384 MBs RAM, and a Sound Blaster, and a 43 GB HD (Unless Windows is on there then ti's 42.9 GB... Weird I know) that ha a 17 inch Flat screen Samsung Syncmaster monitor and built in DVD - ROm and a built in CD burner. That box right now has Free BSD 6 and a 7 gig partition with Windows 98 SE.

Then there is my Mom's old box, it's a Gateway essentials with a 15 inch CRT monitor. That has an 80 GB HD, 192 MBs RAM, and is dual booting Slackware 10.2 and Windows 2000 Professional.

Then there is a Compaq Presario 6000 with 512 MBs RAM a 120 GB HD, and a 17 inch monitor DVD Drive, and a CD burner built in, and it's running Slackware 10.2 as my FTP server.

Then there is my Laptop, which is a Dell Inspiron 5150 witha Pentium 4 M with 3.06 GHz of processor, 512 MBs RAM, an Nvidia Ge Force FX GO 5200, the screen is 15 inches, and a 30 GB HD and DVD-ROM drive and the HD is small because brand new I got it for 1100 dollars, deciding to spend more on processor, RAM, and battery because what is a mobile computer if the battery doesn't last? So I sent an exra 100 dollars for the Lithium battrey and I actually get 6 hours out of it before I need to recharge.

Then there is the machine I'm using now, a Medion, heavily modified, which is my main desktop. It's got a 17 inch HP Pavilion mx70 monitor,
a built in DVD drive, a built in CD burner, an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 video card with 128 MBs of video memory, 512 MBs of RAM, a 350 watt power supply, neon blue LEDs and fans, an 80 GB HD it came with, which has Windows XP on it, and a 160 GB HD I had put in with SUSE 10.2 on it which is what I'm using now, and a 2.40 GHz Celeron Processor. And the reason I said modified was because it came with hardly anything in the case.

I paid 400 dollars for it, added the power supply, added double the RAM, added another HD, added the video card, changed the monitor and basically only left a few things in there, like the MOBO is the same. The front has a sliding panel that lowers with a button press where the other sound card slots are, and the firewire and USB ports are there aside from the ones on the back.

Oh and each box, the Network cards have all been changed. The server has two cards, the rest have one to two cards, and they all have different speakers. I make music, I need good ones. I also have Skull Candy Low Rider head phones for them.

I have 3 NICs not installed as back ups, another gig of RAM or so for just in case not installed in anything yet, another 120 GB HD brand new still in the package for just in case, and some older hardware we keep around for just in case.

Then the other desk has a custom built machine my Wife built. It has a gig of RAM, a 64 bit AMD... can't remember the exact processor speed, and it has a 19 inch flat screen LCD acer monitor, an ATI video card which I cringe thinking about because it was 450 dollars last year but it does run Doom3...

She has surround sound speakers and a huge sub woofer hooked up, a 320 GB HD, and a CD DVD burner combo drive from Asus, and it's in a custom case with LEDs and clear plastic on the outside. That box dual boots Windows and Fedora. She's got RedHat training so She likes it.

Then there is Her laptop, again acer, it was like 3 grand and I'm not even going into the specs for it because it makes me drool and has the CD burner that loads without popping out the drive tray which I love and like a gig of RAM...EVERYONE drools over that laptop.

And then we have another machine we use for parts... Not sure about everything in there I opened it u for the first time a little while ago to pull out some RAM.

And then, finally, my Aunt's old machine is here too. It's crap and needs a new HD. I have a spare 15 inch monitor to use with it. I think the HD is like 7 gigs, and like 64 MBs of RAM, and 8 MBs for video, it sucks but it's still useable. Slackware for that one lol.

Anyway that's our tech room. We have a Cisco switch, a Router, another router actually on the internet, the second one gives access to other machines and has a firewall, and then the switch because the router can't handle all the machine unless you want slow speed. And then another switch not in use right now.

Then I have an 80 GB external USB HD, which I use for back ups, and we both have about 3 1 GB thumb drives, and a couple other things here and there like a laptop cooling pad, my FreeBSD mouse pad, my Slackware mouse pad, a ZIP drive, USB, which has like 20 ZIP disks... I still use them once in a while.

And a closet with a book shelf in it for our computer and tech books. That's most of it. For now. lol.

Most of the machines dual boot except for my server. My Wife's Laptop dual boots XP and Fedora. Though She LOVES Slackware, but as I said, She's Redhat certified. So She likes using Fedora. Neither of us are going to pay for Enterprise RedHat lol.

Software wise we have a **** load. Just in OSs, I'd say, just in Linux alone, about 70 different distros, and multiple versions of each, and I have a full CD thing full of JUST FreeBSD, BSD PowerPak, and so on.

I have to say two things:

1> You have got great collection of machines. But I think I have a machine better than you ;). Now do not come back with a flame. I am just putting my config:

Intel C2D 6320 @ 3.7 GHz (2 X 1.86)
2 GB RAM
160 + 320 = 480 GB HDD
GFx ... I did not add anyhing. It is intel X3000
17 inch Samsung TFT

Thats all! and it runs on openSUSE 10.3

2> The second thing I want to say is: You type a lot!

LOL, WTF why would I flame you? You have a nice processor, nice amount of RAM, some good HD storage, and a good OS running it.

Quote:

---

another gig of RAM or so for just in case not installed in anything yet, another 120 GB HD brand new still in the package for just in case, and some older hardware we keep around for just in case.

---

Exactly my sentiments.................... they also come in handy for troubleshooting and investigating malware;)

Very much so :)

Same thing again:

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...2573E10075604A

Pick a bag with the most stuff in it. You can't look at what stuff is in each one of them, nor can you point out that though one bag is totally full of feathers and weighs 2 pounds the other has a full one pound BRICK in it capable of smashing Windows (puns are funny) you are just going to be told to pick the one with the most stuff in it.

Trying to follow all of this conversation but, I'll point back to the OS bit.

Being a state IT guy, everything is standardized and uses MS products, so I'll never get a chance to take any *Nix for a test drive here or a Mac for that matter. In any event, I'm 60/40 in regards to the Vista BE. We have multiple clients using that platform and it works well for the most part.

Some things I really like? scheduled defrag, advanced firewall config, tightened remote access, and a much more verbose network center.
And things I dislike? Seems to run much slower (especially at startup & shutdown), performing certain tasks as a remote admin are now a total bitch, UPHClean is still not compatible with Vista, and it's still buggy.

I'm actually writing this post on a Vista BE machine :eek:
Anyway, we run Win 2000, Server 2003, XP, and Vista BE here (and throw in a File Server which uses Samba) and I have to say, XP is still by far the best overall. After installing apps on a Vista machine, it's almost a sigh of relief to go back to working on an XP machine (simply for the difference in speed alone). However, I think if I keep working with Vista BE, I'll come to like it much more over time.

I'd love to have a stand alone machine with *Nix on it to putz around with but, that won't happen any time soon. :bawling:

Shag, the firewall for Vista, is there a big difference between that one and the XP SP2 one? (Turned on by default?) and I take it that it does more than block in coming, which is a HUGE false sence of security, which is worse than none at all...

I mean really users would be better off being careful without a firewall than thinking they're safe and doing stupid things because, well, for example, in Solaris, back in the day, you could get RCP to listen on ports above 1023, doing a few tricks, and you could actually get some packets in there, and I think it was Mudge who did this, but he managed to use sed as a way to edit apache.conf as a way to change it so Aoache would run as root and then from there he just waited for the machine to get a reboot which of course started Apache up with root privs which gave him full access.

Basically they had a firewall that only blocked incoming traffic, and the service they did allow he managed to change the port to get in.

Very interesting how he did it really.

Windows 98 I think is the one with the crap encryption that was so low you would basically be better off not using it at all because of that false sense of security.

When I install Windows 2000, I still have the floppy it came with to install the better one.

Not bad for just waking up and being half asleep heh.

Thanks much!

Quote:

---

is there a big difference between that one and the XP SP2 one? (Turned on by default?) and I take it that it does more than block in coming

---

Oh yeah. In Vista BE, they have a new option under Administrative Tools called Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. This puppy is a fully configurable firewall like the ones we are used to seeing in third-party applications. (Inbound & Outbound rulesets, protocol selections, traffic monitoring, etc.)

I still think it needs a bit of work because it can be a royal pain in the arse to configure properly. The funny thing is, I think it's a very cool upgrade and it's much more appropriate as a firewall solution, but, I still don't use it outside of my own system. :eek:

The reason is because we currently have a PIX firewall sitting in front of all our LAN traffic and let me tell you, that tiny little box works wonders. I remember taking that thing out of the box and saying "ok, here's the battery... where's the firewall unit?" and then realizing...that is the firewall unit.

Anyway, I setup the Windows firewall on my system only because when network apps start to go haywire on the clients, it makes it easier for me to not have to sift through a couple dozen firewall rules to figure out what the hell is going on. The PIX is a fairly simple machine to setup once you know how "interfaces" work.

Did I answer your question? I rambled so much I forgot if I did. :what:

Yea I was curious about the new firewall :) I personally have the one's mentioned in my hardware outline, and then each machine depending on purpose has one. The Windows boxes have software added in to the hardware one that already blocks them, and then on my laptop and this machine, my main two, the boxes both have YAST2 configured IPTables.

The FreeBSD machine, well, right now it's being recompiled from sources but there is one on there. Anyone trying to get in there right now though would have a hard time considering it's doing a complete source update.