[Dxspider-support] Which Linux System is best with DxSpider?

Dirk Koopman djk at tobit.co.uk
Mon Jan 3 12:28:39 GMT 2005


On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 21:17 -0500, Jim Snider wrote:
> I current am running Fedora Core 1 but I have run Mandrake 10 too.  Any 
> comments on which is the best linux to run DxSpider?
> 
> My past experience was with CLX running on a RedHat system many years 
> ago and now I have cablemodem here at home and want to start up another 
> node.
> 

My *personal* view, today (and this opinion is only valid just now), I
would go for Mandrake 10.1 official. I have not tested Fedora 3, but
that is just out and would be a reasonable choice too. Equally, the
latest SuSE would do as well. Mandrake is, by far, the easiest to
install on all the diverse hardware that is around today. I believe it
to be *today's* easiest to configure distro (note: "today's" :-). It is
Linux Format's (http://www.linuxformat.co.uk) current favorite as well.

Don't know about Slackware. Don't use (and have never liked) Debian
because they do not put initialisation, configuration and startup files
in the standard places and you need to edit them by hand (mostly) [not a
problem for aged unix hackers like me but...]. Also, it tends not to be
very up to date; although there is a 'bleeding edge' distro and they
have just announced a "release 4" of Woody with most of (note the words
"most of" [their words not mine]) the available security updates.

Redhat had have always had the reputation of not enabling Ham stuff in
the kernel. I don't know whether this is still the case in Fedora 3. 

Mandrake and SuSE are easy to update, are "up to the minute" with
security fixes and have all the perl requirements for DXSpider as
packages.  Debian is also easy to update, has the perl packages, but is
not always up to date. Fedora is a bit more finicky, in my experience,
security wise it is reasonably good, but I don't think its perl package
support is as good as the others. However, CPAN works just fine for all
of them!

A general plea: please would everyone running DXSpider on the net make
sure that their installations are kept reasonably up to date, not just
on the DXSpider front, but also on the distro front. There are a lot of
nasty people out there exploiting SSH and apache bugs (to name but
two). 

Many of you run these things on the net and you could be vulnerable. For
instance, a good mate of mine has recently been rooted because he ran
Redhat 9 with the then latest "official" update for SSH. That update was
at least 2 years out of date when it happened and he was thus an
unwitting sitting duck...

Upgrading to the latest version of your chosen distro can be a pain, but
in the end worth it (IMHO), because you can keep the security related
stuff current most easily.

Happy New Year

Dirk G1TLH    




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