Hi everyone!

[sixwishes]

Hey there,

Just thought I'd introduce myself I'm Matt, from near London in the UK. I run a small Corporate Identity Design company, and we've now been using Linux (Ubuntu) exclusively for our work for 3 months. I also have used Ubuntu for about a year at home.

I mainly came into the Linux world out of curiosity - first distro was SuSE 8.0 - and then Redhat 9.0 - then when that "kicked the bucket" and was discontinued - I took the plunge and used slackware for quite a while. Now I am happily settled on Ubuntu

Computing is my passion, as well as being a people-person. I love both Networking (TCP/IP) and Networking (talking to new people).

I joined the forums mainly due to wanting to be a bigger part of the Linux community, and to learn more. As I use Linux for mission-critical things, I thought I better get to know it inside out

Thanks and take care...

Matt (sixwishes)

[oz]

Welcome to the forums, sixwishes. We hope you'll visit often, learn a great deal about Linux, help others when you can, and of course, have lots of fun here!

ozar

[sixwishes]

Thank you, ozar!

I was thinking of writing an article about our company's switch to Linux, do you think this is a good idea? Could I send it for review to possibly appear on this site?

[oz]

Thank you, ozar!

I was thinking of writing an article about our company's switch to Linux, do you think this is a good idea? Could I send it for review to possibly appear on this site?

That would have to be decided by Core Wizard, the board admin. You'd need to send him a PM and run the idea by him.

[sixwishes]

Ah - I just sent an email to a Core Root address I found on the site, which stated to send a note to if you were interested in writing

Hope I didn't do a "whoopsie" !

Thanks for replying

[Kojak]

Welcome.

As you are using Ubuntu, I only want to remind you (in case you forgot that) to install and configure a firewall and antivirus stuff (e.g. clamav) as without those put in place, Ubuntu is imho very insecure (I cannot share their views on sudo, either). But as a past slacker, I guess you took care of hardening your box already. Should this not be the case, then ask any questions you might have for securing your boxes.

[sixwishes]

Welcome.

As you are using Ubuntu, I only want to remind you (in case you forgot that) to install and configure a firewall and antivirus stuff (e.g. clamav) as without those put in place, Ubuntu is imho very insecure (I cannot share their views on sudo, either). But as a past slacker, I guess you took care of hardening your box already. Should this not be the case, then ask any questions you might have for securing your boxes.

Hi Kojak,

Could you possibly expand on what makes you think that Ubuntu is very insecure? Firewall is covered by Cisco firewall, and there is IPtables on each machine obviously. We are also not running any Windows boxes, so imo I don't feel an Anti-Virus is necessary anywhere but our main file server - which is locked down as much as we could do so.

Thank you for your input and anticipated expansion

[fingal]

Welcome to these forums Matt. I hope you enjoy being a member of our community. Linux boxes are a lot of fun to work with.

[Kojak]

imoh the security problem with Ubuntu is the way they use sudo. sudo can be secure, if configured in an acceptable way, but the Ubuntu use off ALL:ALL in the sudoers file giving your browser, p2p SW and mail client root access is a pretty bad idea! It is more or less like running a Windows XP box as root all the time. The sudo file needs to be tuned or a full root account should be put in place. But that is very hard in Ubuntu as they integrated this sudo hell very deep into the system and you cannot set up a normal root account in Ubuntu any more. It is completely messed up. Some things will work as root, while others, which should work as root, will not work but only with the sudo account. I cursed for weeks because of this sudo problem and after hacking the box for weeks and trying to correct this serious flaw, I erased Ubuntu. It is imho not suited for mission-critical tasks.