On Wed, 11 Jul 2012, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
I am surprised that nobody seems to be concerned about the security of having your public IP address directly on the attached computer. Sure, you can firewall everything, but without a suitable firewall, your machine [Windows, Linux, Mac or other...] will be directly exposed to the Internet.
If you use Windows (particularly the older versions) this is a problem. Modern Linux distributions tend to have almost nothing listening for inbound connections by default so this shouldn't be an issue. Most people here probably started using Linux after ssh obsoleted telnet and rsh for remote logins and after shadow password became mandatory everywhere. There are probably very few people here who can remember the old days when Unix was insecure. http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html Let me know if there's any particular application which you think is a security risk which is typically listening for connections from the outside world and I'll add it to my Play Machine. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/