The city of Munich (where I live) wanted to move 14,000 computers to Linux. Vienna, which is just a stone’s throw away from Munich, has 30,000 PCs. They never planned to move all their computers to Linux though. Their departments are free to choose which OS they want. There was a lot of stir in the media when these cities announced the move to Linux some years ago. Now Vienna has just decided to install Vista on 750 machines. As far as I understand from the news (German) I have read about it, these machines were already running Linux. The reason for the change is that the city needs a language test program for kindergartens which isn’t available for Linux.

Vienna just moved 1,000 PCs to Linux. Munich was a bit more ambitious, but they also have only managed to roll out 1,000 Linux machines so far. Considering that they made this decision five years ago, this is kind of disappointing in my view. If you only count the working days, then this corresponds to about 1 Linux installation per day. If they continue at this pace, they will be able to finish the project in 65 years. Okay, maybe they won’t, but their grandchildren might have a fair chance of finishing it.

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According to a ZDNet article, the average downtime of Windows Server 2003 was increased by 25% in 2007 whereas the downtime of major Linux distros such as Red Hat and Novell decreased by about 75%. The downtime of Windows Server 2003 is nine hours per server, RHEL average downtime is only 1.75 hours.

These are certainly interesting numbers. The article also explains why the downtime of Windows Server 2003 went up. It seems as if there were more Windows updates in 2007 requiring reboots. Hence, one cannot conclude that Windows Server 2003 systems are crashing more often than Linux systems.

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Some days ago, I mentioned that IDC numbers indicate that Linux loses market shares to Windows Server. There is an interesting article on Linux.com claiming that the eWEEK article by Petter Galli that I was referring to in my post, is probably incorrect. There is yet another article from Galli where he responds to some of the critics of his earlier assessment.

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Last week, when I reported about this new Symantec study comparing different operating systems with respect to the vulnerabilities detected in the second half of 2006, I wondered when will the first study come out that includes Vista. I just stumbled across 90 days Vista vulnerability report of Jeff Jones, Microsoft security strategy director. There is an interesting debate going on now in the blogosphere.

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Symantec has just published their new Internet Security Threat Report. They compared Microsoft, Red Hat, Apple, HP and Sun. And guess what? Microsoft got the best grades! You know, there are many comparable studies and they all find different things depending on who financed them. But this one is interesting.

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You might have realized in the past days that 4sysops was unreachable sometimes. There have been content spam attacks from countless different machines resulting in DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service).

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If your desktop machine runs Windows and you have to edit files on a Linux server, then you usually work with an SSH/SFTP client like WinSCP. The problem with such tools is that they don’t allow you to access files the way you’re used to under Windows, i.e., with Windows Explorer or from other Windows applications. What you need is a tool that enables you to map a folder on a Linux box to a Windows driver letter. SftpDrive and WebDrive are two easy-to-use tools that do just that. You’ll see that this makes working with files on a Linux machine much more convenient.

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Poptop is an open source VPN server supporting Microsoft’s PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol). It allows you to use a Linux Server as a VPN Server for Windows machines. This way you can encrypt any communication between the Linux server and your Windows workstation easily. You can use NAT (Network Address Translation) to hide your workstation’s IP address when you access the internet thru the VPN Server. Windows comes with a built-in and easy-to-configure VPN client. Nothing has to be installed on the Windows machine. In this post, I would like to share my recent experience installing Poptop.

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I just read in the German magazine Computerwoche (print) that the number of Linux viruses doubled in 2005 (863) compared to 2004 (422). These numbers come from Konstantin Sapranov who works as a virus analyst for Kaspersky Lab. Of course, one has to be always cautious with such numbers especially coming from an anti-virus vendor. However, it is obvious that the growing popularity of Linux makes it more attractive for virus writers and other villains.

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Jeff Jones complains about Linux advocates making a baseless assertion that Linux is more secure than Windows. To prove his point he compared vulnerabilities with varying degrees of severity for Windows XP SP2 and Red Hat Desktop 3/4. The results are shocking for every Linux fan. Although, I believe that his vulnerability summary is probably correct, it does not say much about security.

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Marius Ducea discussed three ways how to block brute force attacks under Linux using iptables, PAM and fail2ban. All three posts are quite detailed and well written.

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Many Windows admins turn up their nose when it comes to Linux system administration. Although there are good graphical desktop interfaces for Linux, most of the system management is still based on simple text files. Centeris Likewise is a Linux management solution targeting this kind of Windows sysop.

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If you are old enough, you might remember the time when it was quite usual to work on the command line even on a Microsoft system. I am talking about the era of the good old MS DOS. My favourite file manager was the Norton Commander. When I switched to Windows this was the only tool I really missed. Nowadays, it is still usual to work on the command line on Linux boxes, especially when you log on over a WAN. Now, GNU Midnight Commander is one of my favourite tools under Linux. It looks exactly like the good old Norton Commander and has the same functionality plus some Linux specific features like browsing RPM files.
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