| I don't care if my machines can packet-sniff things coming across the | network-- they're all for personal use. I'm not using them in a configuration | where one machine's information needs to be kept private. | | -- Deven | | <rant> I know you don't care. You think that if there's nothing personal on your PC it doesn't matter if it gets owned. But this isn't a data question. Once your machine is owned, you won't notice but it will be a problem for someone else when spam and packets from your machine start flooding.
The proud owners of win2k professional with Code Red infections don't know or care but they are nonetheless a nuisancei. Please consider trying to be a little better than them. Your machines will be used as open relays by spammers and as zombies by ddos script kiddies. All you lose is having your ISP withdraw your connection under their abuse clause and the time it takes to format the HDs and reinstall. But others suffer the inconvenience of tons of junk mail and slow connections due to your gifting your machines to the crackers. I worked for an ISP and one of our clients allowed their Novell Groupwise server get compromised. Between 5.50 am when it happened and 9.30am when we realised our mail server had an excessive load, over 600,000 spams were sent/queued. All our other cleints then suffered the inconvenience of having their email delayed for hours while Postfix struggled with the load. Its almost impossible to flush a big queue like this. Use whatever config you want. Hell, leave all your machines completely open if you want. But be aware that you are inconveniencing people who don't need your spam. </rant> Patrick
