Chapter 1: Introduction

Overview

Once I showed a Windows administrator how to install and work with Linux. He liked the installation process, because it was easy in the latest versions of the operating system. But when we installed and decided to configure the Samba server, there was a flood of questions of the type, "Why does Samba have to be configured? Why can't I just be granted access automatically?" The truth is, Windows administrators are lazy and are used to the operating system doing everything for them. But when their system is broken into, there ensues another flood of questions, this time of a different type: "Why didn't Microsoft provide the tools to disable certain operations?"

As far as users are concerned , once the Linux operating system is installed, it does not require any additional custom configuring. You can start working with any office software and user utilities right away. But network utilities and server programs will not work automatically and require more complex configuring. Practically all operations that can produce undesired results or facilitate intrusions over the network are disabled. The operations are enabled by editing the configuration files or using specialized utilities. The configuration process is rather cumbersome because editing configuration files is awkward and most configuration utilities have the command line interface.

One of the Windows administrators I know gave the following appraisal of Linux based on the complexity of its configuration process: Linux was invented by those administrators who have nothing to do at work so that they could fool around with the configuration files. A week later, the same acquaintance was setting up the Internet Information Server (IIS) service on a server running under Windows Server 2003. His appraisal of this service was the same as for Linux, because by default the IIS version supplied with Windows Server 2003 has all its services disabled and before you can run the server you have to clearly specify what should work and what should not.

Microsoft started designing its operating systems with ease of operation as the foremost goal so that a program installed on the earlier operating systems would work right away without requiring any additional adjustments. With each passing year, Windows security is improving, but at the expense of most functions that make the system easy to use being disabled by default. It is the other way around with Linux. At the inception, it was developed with the security of the system as the foremost concern of its designers. Now, however, this concern has become the secondary priority, with ease of use moving up.

It is rather rough going, because making a system convenient to use detracts from its security and, on the contrary, making a system more secure makes life harder for the users. So manufacturers have to find some reasonable compromise between these two requirements.