Re: [Devil-linux-develop] suggestions for 0.5 Beta CD layout

[Friedrich L. <fl...@fl...>]

Hi!

Martin Mueller wrote:
> 
> Well, I'd oppose a mounted CD, since I have quite bad experiences with
> long running systems and CD-Rs / CD-RWs. I run about 15 firewalls from
> CD, which I created myself and they usually fail to work after 1-2
> years, since the CD gets unreadable sectors, because of the constant
> heat in the cdrom drive. So think it quite advisable to be able to
> take the CD out while the system is running to replace it with working
> one.

That might be true, but from my point of view I would rather change the 
cdrom drive. If the system run's from RAM we are more susceptible to the 
matter that a hacker that cracked into our firewall can change everything.
If you run the same CD for 1-2 years you are out of luck anyway, because
you're hopefully out of date - what, if one of the daemons or the kernel
has a bug? I would suggest updating the CD _at least_ every 6 month. 
How about the CD-ROM drives themself, how long do the work flawlessly?
If they only work for 1-2 year what's the cost of a new drive? Only about 
$47 / 100 DM / 700 ATS. That's _nothing_ compared to the costs when you're
cracked.


> The other point is, in the whole time I run these firewalls, I never
> got an attack on the firewall itself, just on the systems behind it.

How? A descent firewall should be the point of attack not the systems
behind it. Do you use ip-port-forwarding?

-- 
MfG / Regards
Friedrich Lobenstock