The Lair

If anyone asks (and you’d be surprised at how many people do, really), I’m a Redhat man. Not because I have a particular affinity to what is, after all, a commercial entity; but more because that’s the first distribution that made me really get Linux. I had some of my finest Linux moments - you know, when this proverbial lightbulb goes off in your head and you think - “Aaah, that’s how you get a daemon working on startup” - working with Redhat in the bad old days.

But I’ve been running Ubuntu, Mandrake and a weirdly customized version of Slack on occasion for years now, so my experiences with Redhat have been minimal recently. And I installed Fedora on an almost-PC; but got rather annoyed with it after a while. My point: I’m not generally bound up with distribution mania. If it works for me, I use it. I started using Ubuntu for no less (and no more) a reason than the local ylug meetup had someone offering ShipIt installer CDs of Warty Warthog. Took one (hey, it’s free!), pursed my lips, thought “hmm, why not? Everyone else is doing it.” and installed it. It worked, it did what I wanted (as most Linuxes do) so it stayed.

From time to time, I need to remember that not everyone else is as distribution agnostic as I am. Some people hop onto distributions (and indeed, Linux in general) through ideology, not necessarily through a desire to get the job done their way. For the past week, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with SATA support in mainstream distros. Yeah, so there are workarounds and patches and updates. Unfortunately, those options weren’t really available to us at the time (not connected to the net, not a fastish connection etc etc… the excuses, they just keep piling up). What’s worse, I wasn’t physically there - but just providing assistance over IM.

I proposed a radical idea. We needed to get this server done soon. Let’s install Windows.

Yes, really. If the distros we have at our disposal are giving us this much grief over a fiddly SATA disk or three, it’s not worth the pain anymore.

This seriously got me thinking. Windows and Linux both need to be secured before they can run on an internet facing server. There is no “secure by default” mantra toting distro developer I’d trust as much as doing my own audit. Ok, so maybe running OpenBSD might provide a modicum more comfort; but that’s not one of our options. At some point, I need to make the call between futzing around for SATA support on the distros we had at our disposal and just installing Windows and getting started on patching the box.

The jury is still out - but I’m definitely advocating going with Windows on Friday. I swear to $hypothetical_patron_saint_of_linux_distros. Now I just need to convince the other guy I’m working with not to go out and shoot himself because I caved in to the Borg.