On 6/8/06, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@comcast.net> wrote:
> >> Security, since the web and office suites tools on Linux are
> >> historically far more secure than those for Microsoft.
> >
> > . I'm not sure what an Office Suite has to do with the Subversion
> > server family functionality. One of the things that makes the
> > Microsoft office suites "unsecure" is the ability to do scripting
> > and macros. I am currently migrating some Word document
> > content into another doc, while scripting the revision history
> > baked into each document. That fuctionality is not there for
> > OpenOffice or Star Office.
>
> Ouch. I do sympathize with the difficulty. But the problem has to do with
> the underlying server itself. It's often difficult to run a server without
> the office suite, for various non-Subversion reasons.
>
> It only takes one unsuspecting new admin, opening the infested Word document
> or email from the boss while using the server, to trash the server or do
> serious oddnesses to it. Linux and UNIX and Mac have been vastly more
> resistant to that kind of problem.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one. At my previous
employer, we had well over 200 Windows servers, and I can count on one
hand with fingers left over the number that required an Office
installation. Those that did only had this requirement because the
applications running on them had to manipulate/output files in Office
format.
On top of that, we had anti-virus running on all our fileservers and
desktops, so the chances of an "infested Word document" finding their
way to an app/web server were miniscule. And *none* had email clients
installed on them - 90% of them couldn't browser the internet either,
so no worry about people getting infected via webmail either.
But then we also had a *very* hands-off approach to the console (and
rdesktop) - did everything via MMC or other remote management
interfaces whenever possible, and only logged in when you absolutely
*had* to.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Thu Jun 8 19:04:16 2006