Slightly OT: bad rap for Fedora, and realistic effects

[Matthew Miller]

On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 12:45:20PM +0530, Vivek J. Patankar wrote:
> What I would like to see in Fedora 7 is a 2 DVD set that has 
> *everything*. Almost all ISPs that I can opt for here have ridiculously 
> low caps on download limits. So, unless I use my office network (which 
> is okay for my laptop, but not for my desktop), I can't do any heavy 
> duty yum'ing.

Better than that, you'll be able to make an N DVD or CD set containing
whatever you want. And you could include all the security updates, so you
won't have to yum those.

> Not necessarily. AFAIK, Oracle installation has to be done thru GUI. So 
> whenever I am building a box for a database server I have to put in a 
> minimal gnome desktop. My DBA even wanted to have a remote GUI terminal 
> (he heard of XDMCP from somewhere). I literally had to put a gun to his 
> head and make him do all his work via putty.

Put that gun away! Your DBA is totally right. Remote GUI is *exactly* the
way to handle this. You have a much more secure server automatically
protected from X server security flaws (setuid, runs as root, crazy memory
access required = it's gonna happen again), and yet you as an admin have the
full GUI at your disposal.

Using XDMCP is an outdate approach, of course -- instead, tunnel X over ssh.
You can even do this with Putty and a free X server for Windows, if
necessary.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>