[ILUG] M$ SFU 3.5 - redistribution and passport?

[Brian Foster]

  | Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 23:30:20 +0000
  | From: Liam Bedford <lbedford at lbedford.org>
  | 
  | Brian Foster wrote:
  |  > does anyone have any experience with SFU 3.5 (the
  |  > free (as in free beer) M$ Services for Unix™)?  [ ... ]
  |  > if anyone has actually _used_ SFU 3.5, I would be
  |  > interested hearing of your experiences.
  |
  | I couldn't use it. It requires installation on an NTFS filesystem,
  | which I didn't have.

 not very many people seem to have tried it;
 or more accurately, tried and posted about it
 (such that Google™ can find the posting).
 to be fair (with M$? why? ½☺ ) it is fairly new.

 some people have issues such as yers (NTFS);
 or mine (don't meet the software and/or hardware
 prerequisites);
 or object to the poor security --- apparently,
 in typical clewless style, all(?) services are
 enabled, at least by default (then made worse by
 using NIS (née yppasswd) and telnet (there is no
 SSH!)).

 and I am not the only one who refuses to get the
 necessary M$ “Passport‟.  e.g., both the US FTC and
 the European Commission, as well as others (AFAICR),
 have filed lawsuits against M$ re “Passport‟:  its
 dubious security, M$'s data use and data retention
 policys, and assorted other issues.  plus it has
 a history of problems, including some astonishing
 security and privacy holes.

  | It's a significantly different product to cygwin (not in what
  | it provides, but in how it does it).  It's an actual subsystem
  | (like the POSIX one but better), rather than being a hacked
  | win32 program to run unix on (cygwin).

 yes.  it's basically one of the BSDs (OpenBSD,
 I _think_), ported to the NT HAL.  (the use of
 *BSD _may_ be fairly recent: there are opinions
 that the earlier for-$ versions were different?)

 I continue to be interested in hearing of the
 experiences of anyone who has actually _used_
 the bloody thing.

cheers!
	-blf-
--
«How many surrealists does it take to    |  Brian Foster      Montpellier,
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