Re: Red Hat vs Debian, installing a POP server. Security

On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 14:53, Richard.Corfield.Admin-XZoyATsUNX5Wk0Htik3J/[email protected] wrote:

> Its a general winge at the business world in general, rather than Linux.
> I use Debian. Its defaults are pretty secure, and its packages do a good
> job at configuring themselves. My employer has just bought Red Hat,
> because of the Corporate Presence. I perhaps ought to be sending this
> to their rep, as I expect we have a support contract with them.



I haven't tried to purposefully set up a "secure" Redhat server yet (I'm
a desktop/home user, only been using Linux for a year), but from what I
understand, some people recommend doing a custom install without
installing any servers, and then installing the ones you want after the
initial install is complete -- this prevents any ports being set open by
default during setup.  I found this suggestion, which is probably even
more involved than you had in mind, as it involves setting up some of
the system in an LFS method; but if you're going for security overkill,
it sounds interesting.


> It has taken some effort to get a POP server working (OK, about 15
> minutes). On Debian it sorted itself out nicely. Apt got the dependencies
> automatically. 


There is apt for Redhat on freshrpms.net, also, if that is of interest
to you -- though you probably already knew that.  

It seems to work well, I haven't had too many problems, yet.

Have fun,
Phil