[plug] Red Hat Linux 7 security,etc. problems?

[Peter Wright]

Hello all,

My brother lives over in one of those weird eastern states and is currently
in a position where he's being given a machine by his work to use at home,
and they're even paying for an ISDN line to be installed at his place (nice
work if you can get it, hey... :).

As it's a general UNIX admin role, his colleagues are fairly OS-agnostic
and don't really give a rat's arse if he installs Win or Linux or FreeBSD
or Solaris/x86 or whatever on it. Unfortunately, being a relative Linux
newbie, he's been corrupted *ahem* advised to install RedHat Linux 7 on it
and will be doing that unless I can lead him back to the light of the one
true distro. :-)

Anyway - thanks to the recent conversations on plug between Leon and
Christian and various other people that know more about security issues
than me (not that that's hard), alarm bells have started ringing in my head
at the idea of a relative Linux newbie doing a default install of RedHat7
and sticking it on a permanent ISDN link. Hrrmrmrmmmrmmmmm.

What I'd like to know if anyone can help is either:

(a) some of the more well-known problems with RH7, both security and other,
that hopefully I can use to persuade him it's just a bad option and he
should use something else,

(b) one or more URLs that explain how he can turn off services, upgrade
known-buggy programs (and downgrade gcc to the stable version *sigh*), etc.
to turn a default RH7 install into something that doesn't suck quite so much.

I'd hoped Redhat's site might have (b)-related info or links, but
apparently not. Or at least I can't find them.

Let me know if anyone can help.

Danke schön,

Pete.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

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