A POSIX compliant shell would be a good starter then.
Are they doomed?
- Thread starter RTexasF
- Start date
Install Ubuntu or Linux mint on it.
My tenuous understanding is that:
- bash, post 4.0 (this puts us in 2008? 2009? ---EDIT: '09---), is fully POSIX compliant; with the obvious caveat **as long as you write POSIX-compliant stuff**. And if you do, wouldn't most shells fit in this bucket?
- POSIX's specifications, so say people whose knowledge and experience are greater than my own, leave a lot undefined, so a lot of shells are going to have capabilities and features beyond the POSIX standard
My brother-in-law is a systems architect for a major bank and they are transitioning from big iron (AIX?) to the Azure cloud (RHEL?) I think I'll drop him a line and see if he has a thought on this. And now I am interested in what pieces of bash extend beyond POSIX (or in what ways fsh falls short of "compliance") compliance and whether or not anything I've ever automated wades into those waters. Maybe it speaks to the minute scale of my web development empire, but I cannot see myself ever needing portability from my rinky-dink bash scripts to $something_fancier or something like Korn on OpenBSD. I sense the spinning up of a VM soon in my future!
It's the PC OEMs that do a lot of this. When you work in a corporate environment and have an internal PC imaging process, installs are very clean, and options are configured for user familiarity.
AIX is not just a big iron OS, plenty of IBM 1RU pizza box servers with Power processors will run it. Although it was mainly a banking type application that we ran. I supported it for many years with a past employer. The COBOL application finally was moved to Windows with the Fujitsu COBOL compiler near the end of the 2010s.
This is a good article on LWN. Linux is mostly POSIX compliant, but there are areas where being POSIX compliant makes no sense.
lwn.net
Better than POSIX? [LWN.net]
lwn.net
I think of securing my computer as being like locking/deadbolting my door or locking my car.
Whether my house, car, office, or anything else, someone determined can certainly get in. In fact just breaking into a car-any car-is pretty easy if all you want is something inside it-just smash a window and you're in.
Still, though, I lock my car door. There are people who will walk down the street or through parking lots and just tug on door handles. If they find a locked door, they'll move on to the next one. If they find an unlocked one, they may well stay and look around more.
Similarly, I try not to leave valuable things in my car, or if I do, try not to make them visible. I don't want to give some a REASON to throw a big rock through the window.
Could someone who wanted to get into my computers? Of course, but I try to put at least basic obstacles in their way by using current OSs with up to date security, and I also don't have anything that someone would necessarily want to make a great deal of effort to find.
I've talked about this before on here, but I run old OSs all the time. I have a computer in my office running Mac OS 9. I have another in the lab running Windows 95. I actually would love to upgrade it to Windows 98, NT 4.0, or Win2K, but I want to be VERY careful to not break the software it's running. There's one particular software license on it that's all but irreplaceable-I have the media to reinstall it, but not the key, and I don't know when I even saw a key for sale(it's to run a Hewlett-Packard 8452a spectrophotometer, something that i pretty sure Agilent wants to pretend never actually existed). I could probably get away with Windows 98 without too much worry, and that would at least let me run a USB printer without driving myself crazy getting it to talk(especially since the printer I'm trying to use is too new to have Win95 drivers and I'm REALLY banking on it working as a generic PCL5/PCL6 printer) but I also really, really should image the drive just to have a backup in case soemthing bad happens. I also don't want to go too nuts on OSs-it's a Pentium Pro which should run Win2K fine, but only 48mb RAM now, and I don't have any big 72 pin SIMMs to upgrade it with...
In that same lab, there's a computer running Windows 10. It has not been online since I took delivery of it, and I have no intention of changing that. For one thing, the instrument it's connected to(a GC-MS) communicates over LAN. Just plugging the wall network jack into the router that connects everything else would mess with IP addresses and it would no longer work with the hardware it's supposed to control. At a previous job, one of the labs had a similar system, and I had to manually reset IP addressess almost weekly because they would try to do just that. There's a way to get it all working by using a second NIC(and some nuances with having to turn the one connected to the internet off before connecting to the GC-MS and then turning it back on, since apparently HP/Agilent just keeps tweaking the same 30+ year old software instead of actually fixing stuff like this) or probably even WiFi, but I also don't want to take a chance on the software my work would then install messing with the main function of the computer.
BTW, we were hit with ransomware in the fall of 2021. It shut us down for 2 weeks, and it was probably 6 months before we'd fully recovered. Needless to say, they take cyber security very seriously at my work now, where I felt like they were a bit loose before...
