Re: Web Migration FAQ Draft 2.0

[Wade Hampton <whampton@staffnet.com>]

Michael Viron wrote:
> 
> Guys & Gals,
>  Below is a draft of a response to the main person responsible for the web
> migration at UWF from NT to Linux.  I need your comments and suggestions on
> improving it before I send it.
> 
> Mike Viron
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> "Q Why do we have to migrate to a NT server?
> A Moving the university web pages from a UNIX server to a Windows NT server
> will provide the university with greater security and stronger integration
> with the rest of the university systems."
> 
> Although NT may provide stronger integration with some of the university
> systems, a properly configured linux box can be as secure, if not more so,
> than Windows NT.  A case in point would be the University's mail server
> which is currently configured as an "open relay" SMTP server (in addition
> to handling pop3 connections).  Open relay SMTP servers are dangerous
> because they allow people external to the university to use university
> facilities and equipment to send unsolicited commercial email (SPAM) to
> unsuspecting users both inside and outside of the university which
> tarnishes the reputation of UWF as an excellent school for computer science.
You might want to point to the Army dropping NT and to the British Crown
adopting Linux????
> 
> The Web Spinners main server is running sendmail under linux, and only
> accepts connections from either our office machines or from a uwf dialin
> connection, not from all over the place.
> 
> You also made mention of the uwf.edu server running as a novell
> server--Linux has many software packages (including samba) that allow the
> same type of drag and drop interface.  Samba, if configured properly, can
> be just as secure as serving files over the network on a Novell connection.

Other additions might be reliability, stability, remote maintenance, 
and performance.  You indicated that the NT server was down a lot and
unaccessable a lot -- get hard numbers from the prior Linux server 
(do you have logs? -- I change /etc/rc.d/rc.local to write a single line
for each boot to /ver/log/bootlog.txt).  Get logs from the NT server
(a bit harder, but there is some info there).

Good luck,
-- 
W. Wade, Hampton  <whampton@staffnet.com>  

Linux is new, it's come out of nowhere, it's free. Hard to beat that 
price. And it's taking marketshare left and right.  

--Microsoft's lawyer, in closing argument, Bristol v. Microsoft,
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/bti/07-15closing.htm