RogerS":pst7i1ea said:
John
Eric wasn't taking a pop at you. Just giving us some useful hints. Maybe the quote was taken a bit out of context.
Meanwhile back on thread, it's very quiet from our OP. Any news ?
Hi John (especially): most definitely I wasn't taking a pop at anyone.
I was speed-reading the thread (badly) in a busy day (probably shouldn't have been, really!), and it raised the mental flag of 'Mac: root-equiv risk', which is somewhere I've been many times before, mainly with PC users, admittedly. I've specifically set up the Macs here to avoid it and although I've got three curious teenagers* never had a virus problem (three PCs, five Macs, one Linux proxy server, and other stuff).
Apologies if you thought I was aiming at you - there's no way I'd do that to anyone on the forum.
Cheers,
As an aside: the Windows security model is generally considered to be horrible, compared to UNIX-based systems (Linux, Mac, etc.). It does work, but I remember several hardened HP-UX sysadmins laughing out loud during training on NT years ago, when the poor trainer tried to praise it. Even Novell's ancient NetWare 3.xx and 4.xx was better.
You
can do the non-admin trick with PCs too - do your day-to-day stuff without Administrator permission and log-in as admin. only for installing programs and configuration. Frankly though, Microsoft's rather poor choices way back now make it hard to keep a virus-free PC. It does work though, and using an account without admin. permissions won't slow your work down like a virus-checker will. And anyway, by definition, virus-checkers can't easily catch new viruses using novel exploits to gain control, at least not until some damage is done. 'Virus' is appropriate jargon to use, as, like human 'flu, it's the new strains that do harm, before defences can be established.
Thus I don't have anti-virus software running on my PCs, although I run the occasional comprehensive check. I take other measures though, which work: I last had a genuine active virus around seventeen years ago, given to me (on floppy disk) by an R+D lab in a very major computer company!
Hope this helps. Oh, and I have to be a PC user for work, but, given the choice, there's no contest in my mind.
*my teenagers are definitely curious, in all senses!
