Monday, July 12, 2010

Why *NIX is the future ?

"perfect replication is enemy of any robust system" - DAEMON by Daniel Suarez

This is the single biggest reason why windows systems/networks are captured so easily by worms, hackers and viruses. Each windows network is made of exact clones and if an attacker can pawn one system in the network he can annihilate each and every one of them. A typical corporate windows network is made up of identical systems running workstations, laptops, routers and servers. Once a box is compromised each and every one of them is compromised.


Compare this to a linux system/network. Even though it is possible to write a virus/worm for linux based systems, writing a virus which can affect every posix complaint system is at best improbable. Almost every *nix box is different from each other. Kernels, Desktop environments, distributions, servers, browsers etc all are be different and this makes is so much difficult to run an exploit on each of these machines in one go.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

and that is the precise reason it makes it diffcult to write a software which will run on all the systems, provide support for all the systems and maintain all the systems ( u need experts for all of them )

Piyush said...

@anonymous
First of all, even if your argumnet had been true, so what ?

Second of all, you are wrong. It is possible to write cross platform apps in java(swing et al), QT, GTK and above all HTML. There are many more cross platform frameworks / workarounds. For instance you can run .Net apps on linux using mono. You can run linux apps on windows using cygwin. You can use wine to run windows binaries. However corporations generally try to make windows targeted. Some people just don't want to run their apps on other system as there is not a big enough market for it.

On linux most of the apps have packages for various linux flavours. You can practically run all the code written for one system on another.