[MLUG] Re: hacking for the grade

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Moved to Membership list:

On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, George B. Robb III wrote:

> For entertainment it would be fun to see an old NT 4.0 with IIS 3.5 
> enabled next to the LAMP boxes...
>
> F to the students that can't crack the IIS box...
>
> :)
>
> Shawn Parker wrote:
>
> > http://www.securitydump.com/content141.html
> >
> > it would be easy for the professor to set up a couple of LAMP boxes for 
> > the assignment.


I do have a question below...

I just submitted a grant where I plan to do all the data management work 
on a nice shining new Linux server with Apache/MySQL/PHP.  A couple of 
people asked if Linux was suitable for this kind of thing.  I added this 
wording in response to those questions:

  Linux operating systems have become predominant in high-end computing
  in recent years.  All major producers of proprietary UNIX operating
  systems also offer Linux on their biggest systems (IBM, SGI, Sun, HP)
  and all of the supercomputers purchased recently by our Minnesota
  Supercomputing Institute are running Linux (SGI Altix, IBM Netfinity and
  IBM BladeCluster).

I find that people think that Linux must be good if our supercomputing 
institute is using it.  It does seem like Linux doesn't quite get the 
respect it deserves, but maybe that's just because of the advertising 
budget! ;-)

So here's my question:  If the LAMP box is set up and configured 
appropriately with minimal services, won't it be virtually impossible for 
someone to crack it?  We'll be using SSH and Apache and just about nothing 
else (probably VNC via SSH port forwarding), and SSH connections will be 
limited to the local network (via tcp wrappers) with VPN for outside.  I 
don't think it will be cracked, but if it is, we'll have tripewire, etc., 
to detect intrusion.  We also have very frequent tape backups so that we 
can recover pre-intrusion data.

Mike

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