News from PANUG/BizNix - August 14, 2003
http://panug.org - http://biznix.org

BIZNIX MEETING TONIGHT
The BizNix meeting is tonight. It starts at 6:30 pm
at Novell's office near Washington Square in Tigard. 
Directions are on the BixNix web site at http:biznix.org


WINDOWS DRIVES
by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers

Most of my work these days is with Linux and I seldom
have time for Windows but this past week was an
exception. I was designing some Web pages with new
style sheets (CSS) and I wanted to see how well they
rendered with the latest version of Internet Explorer
and Netscape. I tried to download and install both.

The W32/Blaster worm inspired me to update to the latest
W2K service pack. So, I tried to download and install it.

In all cases, I failed. I didn't have enough room on
drive C. Two of the three downloads didn't present me
with the option to install using another drive, where
I have plenty of free space. The third download did
allow me to choose another drive letter but then
told me I didn't have enough room on drive C.

My mistake was trying to apply common sense security
measures to Windows. With any OS besides Windows,
we deliberately put files of different types in
different places. With Unix/Linux, variable data
files are never stored in the same place as executable
programs. We deliberately segregate the files into
different directories. Further insulation can be
had by using separate disk partitions and setting those
to be immutable, nonexecutable, etc.

With NetWare, it's similar. You don't make your
entire disk partition volume SYS: for numerous
reasons. But in the Windows world, you pay a penalty
for trying to use these security techniques. I guess
you're expected to just give your entire hard disk to
drive C and forget about security. No wonder worms
like W32/Blaster have an easy time.


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Member contributions do not necessarily represent the
official positions of PANUG or BizNix. If you don't
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