Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Dec 3, 2011 15:38 UTC (Sat) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by nix
Parent article: Quotes of the week

Really?

I've plugged at least three new (as in, this computer hadn't seen them before) gadgets since my last reboot 227 days ago. (TASCAM external ADC, a TI DSP EVM and a USB-to-serial cable.) And those are just the three I remember. I don't remember if I plugged my wife's phone in or not, for example. One of these days, I'll be moving the scanner over to my computer, and I know my machine hasn't seen it before.

I try to reboot at most 1 - 2 times a year at most, once my system's stable.

And it doesn't have to be that you bought the gadget new. It has to be a new-to-this-computer gadget that doesn't have the appropriate driver. "Hey Mom, before you leave, can I grab that photo you took of the two of us off your camera?" *plugs it in* "One moment please. Now reboot." If I happen to upgrade before the next time she visits... am I up for another such reboot?

I guess that brings up a second question: Would you retain the list of drivers you've "faulted in" so that the next time a vendor sends you a security patch, or the next time you upgrade your OS, you don't have to re-fault in all your gadgets? And is there an option for a batch mode? "Thank you for installing LatestShinyDistro overtop of LostItsLustre Distro. Find everything you own that you'll want to hot-plug into a USB port, and I'll go build you a proper kernel. Press enter when done." Uh, no.

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Quotes of the week

Posted Dec 4, 2011 2:07 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

Well, it's on a private network behind a firewall, with only one port open to the world running an up-to-date sshd. (I do regularly compile the latest updates.) There are no ports forwarded from the firewall to this machine. I have two user accounts on this machine: mine and my wife's, and currently my wife's account doesn't have a valid password set, and so is disabled.

I trust everyone that uses my private network (my wife and a couple friends).

Sure, someone *could* try to hack my WiFi and then try to find a remote root vulnerability that doesn't require an open port, and then try to guess my 8 character randomly generated alphanumeric password, but really, I'm not too worried about this machine.