[plug] [link] Dept. of Homeland Security site switches to Linux from Windows 2000

James Devenish devenish at cyllene.uwa.edu.au
Tue Jan 28 14:42:16 WST 2003


On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 05:51:58AM -0000, Simon Scott wrote:
> The article doesnt actually make much sense. In one sentence they claim MS
> released a patch for SQL Server months ago but few people applied it, and in
> the very next breath it claims that Linux is better because the patches come
> out quicker..... errrr, even tho you'd still have to apply them!?!?
[...]
> Maybe this says more about windows admins vs linux admins than the respective
> OS's.

Well, the difference may be that if you do an APT update/upgrade under
Debian and it just picks up security updates, you can have reasonable
confidence that:

 - when you confirm that you would like to proceed, you will still have
   a usable system without fuss even on a live production system.
 - the changes are limited to fixes for bugs and you can visit the
   online developer resources to see the exact code changes.
 - the interaction of the changes with your existing system is
   a non-event.
 - each individual change has passed the eyes of a considerable number
   of people.

On the other hand, if you have to download a tens-of-megabytes update
file that clearly makes sweeping and unknown changes to many parts of
the system and could potentially invalidate your existing configuration,
you probably want to do it on your backup/test systems first.





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