[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 10:41:37PM -0400, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 10:24:44PM -0400, Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366 wrote:
> > > 
> > > I'm sorry, but am I missing something here? I've heard lots of people
> > > complaining about how secure various OSes (IRIX, Solaris, etc.) are 'out of the
> > > box'. Who cares? 
> > 
> > If you don't make any more money and have to spend more time on it,
> > you would care.  The customers don't understand security and expect it
> > to be there as part of the base service.
> 
> you are right, however, it takes all of what?  5 minutes to secure a Solaris
> box?  that pretty much negates your argument IMHO (or not so humble as the case
> may be)

Hi Brian,

You are an IRIX guru, so how long would this take for IRIX?

Remember that this is not a sealed-services box, there will be lusers
with actual logins on such boxen.  Assume one account gets compromised
- how tough is it secure IRIX against most local root exploits?

Not trying to be snotty, I actually want to know...
  
> > I don't say anything about relative quality; there are things IRIX has
> > that OpenBSD does not - such as XFS, SMP support, sproc based threads
> > and "normal" threads, etc.  
> 
> what what is this /usr/src/sys/xfs directory in my OpenBSD 3.1 source tree?
> is this something other that the "real" XFS?  i don't need it for these two
> machines i'm building, but i'm very curious.
> 
> > OpenBSD's thread implementation is so lame that I can't run a needed
> > application on SPARC32 (and probably not SPARC64 either and must
> > resort to using x86 hardware.)
> 
> that's a shame.  but at least it will make a nice Bridging Packet Filter which
> is what i plan to do with it. ;)

If I was offering solely Apache with my colo accounts it would be
Sparc/SGI and a Cray with blinky lights to impress the suits and earn
me geek points.

Cordially

Patrick Giagnocavo
patrick at zill.net