JHZR2
Staff member
dialup with accelerator is very good for about 85% of all web surfing... If I didnt have DSL for $17.95/month, Id be doing accelerator dialup.
JMH
JMH
wireless internet providers...
- Thread starter 97tbird
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Unix OSes sure do have that problem. Anyone who thinks otherwise ought to go look up "rootkit" on Google.
With a sample size of one (Linux machine), you can't draw very many conclusions.
How about a larger sample size?
I worked for a company that offered "dedicated servers". I forget the exact figures, but they had about 500 Linux machines. The customer was responsible for maintaining the software. Many of them did not bother to patch and upgrade the box as required, and guess what? They got compromised, a root kit was installed, the boxes started port scanning and running IRC bots, they bacame FTP "warez" repositories, etc.
I got to deal with cleaning many of them up. At one point, we started installing Linux kernels without loadable modules support because someone created a loadable module that could hide itself and any rogue processes that are running or connections that are open. This meant that simply re-installing a fresh copy of "ps" and "netstat" wouldn't show what was going on.
The point is, ANY operating system needs to be patched with security fixes as they are made available. There have been security problems with the following software which runs under Unix (including Linux):
Qpopper (provides POP3 services)
Bind (provides nameserver service)
Sendmail (provides SMTP services)
wu-ftpd (provides FTP services)
SSHD version 1 (provides secure shell services)
There's many more.
Bottom line..if you think security is just an XP problem, I hope you have a good firewall.
[ July 06, 2006, 07:15 PM: Message edited by: brianl703 ]
Make certain you lock down the wireless, without some decent security your neighbors will all have access to your Internet connection as well as your PC's. Wireless is extremely easy to access, especially if you leave everything at the defaults.
You can check the device manager and see if your laptop has a wireless NIC in it.
For the most part a router is pretty easy to set up. However I much prefer to use a router with a firewall. Simple NAT is not enough in my opinion.
I would recommend a Wireless Router with a firewall. Make sure it has multiple ports (at least 4) for the LAN should you ever want to expand and plug a desktop in.
Wireless Security
The very action of network address translation, where one IP is shared among several machines which have internal IPs, does provide a firewall function.
Any traffic from the outside directed to the external IP will not be passed to any of the internal machines unless either it is in response to a connection opened by an internal machine or the user has created a mapping to tell the NAT device where to send the traffic.
The NAT device would have no idea where to send the unsolicited traffic if neither of these are the case, and would simply drop it.
Any traffic from the outside directed to the external IP will not be passed to any of the internal machines unless either it is in response to a connection opened by an internal machine or the user has created a mapping to tell the NAT device where to send the traffic.
The NAT device would have no idea where to send the unsolicited traffic if neither of these are the case, and would simply drop it.
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