>>>>> "David" == David Phillips <david at acz.org> writes: David> Wayne Johnson writes: >> Installing Linux (we have a lab with ~20 PCs, might as well >> give them some behind the wheel). David> This is a problem. What distro do you use? Do any of the David> distros with an easy installer offer a free, automatic David> system for security updates? With Debian, you could easily David> setup security updates to run nightly from cron. David> Unfortunately, Debian does not have the easiest installer. Mandrake urpmi makes for a pretty easy, automatic system for security updates. Sadly, (1) configuring urpmi requires a plunge into the command-line, and often requires multiple tries (mirrors aren't always available....) and (2) configuring urpmi for automatic updates requires grokking cron. I suppose someone could set this up in some kind of installer wrapper for easy use by newbies. Ideally, it would be good to do this in some way like Bastille, that makes it easy to understand what and why you're doing it so that eventually the user could do it him/herself from the cl. David> Another issue is the operating system becoming obsolete. David> Some companies such as Red Hat make their operating systems David> obsolete faster than even Microsoft. How does the user David> upgrade without reinstalling from scratch? Ideally, the David> operating systems needs a way to update itself from any David> version to any version with no user intervention besides a David> few questions. Groan. I don't think anyone has a good answer to this one. [Mandrake has a pretty good try, but if you have one of the closed-source video cards, it don't work...] >> Access Control (passwd, group, file system security) David> There is a lot more to UNIX security than just that. David> Understanding file permissions is almost useless without David> understanding process credentials. Why shouldn't things David> run as root? Why shouldn't all daemons run as "nobody"? David> If a process is compromised, what other files and processes David> can become compromised? There may be a lot more to security than that, but these people aren't professional sysadmins, and probably don't want to be. They probably should be trained with some minimal understanding, not what it takes to make them dangerous. >> GUI vs Command line (including a tutorial in Vi) [...snip...] I know this will evoke squawks, but I think you should teach a tiny bit of emacs. Why? Because you get emacs keybindings all over the place in the various shells. Then point them at some easy to use, but relatively crippled editor like something packaged with gnome or (my preference) KDE. [ok, start the religious war.] >> E-mail Serving David> Make sure to pick a secure MTA, such as qmail or Postfix. I suggest postfix. qmail has too many aspects that break the conventional Unix file structure for configurations, IMHO. If God had meant us to use /var/qmail/control, s/he wouldn't have given us /etc.... :-) >> Perl David> The thing for PHP also applies here, basically. Perl is David> not a good first language. If the user wants to learn Perl David> later, recommend a good book. Yup. Stay away from this puppy in semester 1. I'd second the suggestion of just avoiding programming languages. David> Yep. >> Any suggestions? David> Don't. Newbies should not be deploying machines on the David> Internet, period. Teaching them how to setup a Linux David> operating system for a desktop machine that will be behind David> a hardware NAT router is probably alright. The fact is that they WILL be doing this, whether they should or not. Harm mitigation seems like a reasonable thing to do. Teaching them how to set up a Linux desktop behind a router is a laudable goal, but it's a different goal. And if you figure out how to teach them to live with a world in which MS Office docs are the de facto standard, let me know! :-) David> Need an email server? Web hosting? Outsource it. If an David> organization can't afford $15 a month for that, they David> certainly can't afford to be deploying machines on the David> internet. David> Businesses exist to make money, not do something a certain David> way because you think it is cool (case in point: vi). Make David> sure a solution's total cost of ownership is cheaper than David> the alternatives. Software cost is usually a small factor. Recall that non-profits are part of the course audience. $15/month may not be insignificant for them. They tend to be cash-poor and labor-rich (at least relatively). Cheers, R _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list