Re: [tlug] Unix's 40th Birthday

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2009-08-21 08:49 +0900 (Fri), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Oh, I'll concede that I don't know what OS the big iron in the Maes
> East and West run.  And I suppose there's some big iron in the
> basement of most big companies.

The big iron is Cisco and similar. Unix-based systems just won't
route at the speed that's necessary, for architectural reasons. (I
speak as someone who's both run routers ranging from KA9Q to several
full-blown Unices on workstation-type hardware, and who's used and
is reasonably familiar with the internal architecture of "big iron
routers." Incidently, that "big iron" is not so big in terms of
processing power, it's just distributed and used in a very different
way.)

> But I know that an awful lot (by model count, can't say about sales)
> of the consumer and SOHO routers run some embedded Unix (usually Linux
> or NetBSD, I guess).

By sales, too, I would imagine; it seems very likely that a lot more
home routers are purchased than even low-end Cisco gear.

> And when you count the other no-see-um at-the-perimeter boxen like
> firewall gateways, mail filters, and other proxies, I bet most of
> those run Unix variants except at the most well-heeled Microsoft
> shops.

True enough, though you might be suprised at the number of firewalls,
VPN servers, and so on that run on Cisco-like gear. For home use,
however, I'd expect that a lot of VPN connectivity, for example, is done
by a Windows box.

> In some sense, recent Windows doesn't run on commodity hardware
> anymore....Windows's appetite for resources continues to increase
> apparently uncontrollably. Maybe WinCE runs on keitai denwa, but XP,
> Vista, and 7 don't. All the Eee PC class machines run XP....

Clearly, MS could shoot themselves in the head here by carrying on with
the bloat introduced between XP and Vista that the market (at least that
part of it that makes any kind of active choice in this) is rejecting.
However, I think that MS, even lacking the better leadership that it had
in the 90s, has a reasonable chance of coming to their senses at some
point, and they do have a huge market of people who will buy the product
regardless to support them while they come to their senses.

It will be interesting to see if Dell is still offering XP downgrades
for their business machines in 2010.

It's also going to be interesting to see if the competition can avoid
the downhill slide that's started over the last couple of years. Every
time I upgrade Ubuntu it gets a bit more byzantine, which is not good
from a security point of view, and policies that automatically have
me running dns, mail, web, etc. etc. servers open to the world simply
because I happened to install the package to play with. This is just
inviting attack.

(Actually, the ssh one might be one of the most dangerous, since the
default policy is vulnerabile to the password-guessing attacks that have
been running in the wild for years.)

We're already seeing effective trojans and viri for Macs; any expansion
of the Linux user base at the expense of Windows is only going to
increase the economic incentive to attack Linux systems. And if the
Ubuntu and Debian maintainers are heading towards a Windows level of
security, what's going to happen as more and more vendors start adapting
Linux to their custom boxes?

> ...and even with reasonable consumer boxen like my wife's Vaio
> (2.5GB RAM)...

Well, that definition changes rapidly, of course. For mid-range
developer boxes, 3GB has been the minimum memory size (you need 3 DIMMs
for all but the newest i7 motherboards) for a year now, and these days
we wouldn't bother to put in less than 6GB.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com