Please note, before you cry "...off with his head!", that I fully support and hope for the best from all open source software. Richard Stallman is probably my #1 hero in the computer world. All hail GNU/Linix and so on... BUT, My experience has shown that there is another side to it. Just about every Linux box I have worked on has been hacked and I've never lost an NT server. I have long wondered if the general opinions about Linux being more stable / secure were wishfull thinking or if they are born out by numbers. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nf/20030523/bs_nf/21583 A count of the problems reported for XP Professional is available on the Microsoft Web page that lists all of its security bulletins. Use the pull-down menu to find the bulletins for Windows XP Professional. The list starts in November 2001. In the 18 months since then, 27 bulletins about security flaws or other bugs have been posted for Professional XP. To count the fixes and bugs for Red Hat Linux 7.2, go to the company's errata page and begin counting from November 2001. From November 2001 until now, the company has issued 158 security bulletins or bug fixes (not counting the enhancements listed on that page). Also, the Linux-Unix OS is largely in the server environment, where the vast majority of Windows installations are in the client environment, The difference in technical skills in those two user bases could greatly influence perceptions of OS stability. {i.e. Linux has smart people running it and Windows has to do its best with idiots like me! } ...with Windows, there's a rather aggressive community trying to find bugs to denigrate Microsoft and Windows. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&ncid=1209&e=1&u=/pcworld/20030528/tc_pcworld/110906 For the second time in as many months, the Apache Software Foundation released an updated version of the popular open-source Web server software, only to warn users of a critical security hole in previous versions of the software that the update patches. Among those fixes is a patch for a security hole in the mod_dav module that could be exploited remotely, causing an Apache Web server process to crash, according to the bulletin. A second fix is for a denial-of-service vulnerability affecting Apache's authentication module. By exploiting a bug in configuration scripts used for password validation, attackers could launch remote denial-of-service attacks that would cause valid user names and passwords to be rejected, the bulletin said. James Newton (webmaster, former admin #3) http://www.piclist.com jamesnewton@piclist.com 1-619-652-0593 VM 1-208-279-8767 FAX -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics