Linux caught a rat!!
 

In a prev. post - i shared a recent experience where I installed linux on a computer for my brother and gave it to him.


Check this out....

One of the reasons i did this was because the comp. they (he has flat-mates) were using was always down, or very slow, almost unusable. I couldn't understand why it was so unreliable - it was running XP, and i had secured it pretty much solid, as much as I know how.

Anyway, it's been two weeks on debian 2.6/gnome or so now, and I've got a couple funny things to share....


1) My bro is very happy with the performance and applications. But one night he called me and said the computer had crashed. He was looking at the screen at that moment and said it was showing some major error, "protection fault - shutting down" or something. I said, "hit a key", and he's like " i dont' want to mess it up" I said hit a damn key and he did. Of course it was a screensaver (i set it to rotate diff. savers...) Then i told him to open a terminal and check 'uptime' and he was laughing... By the way, this particular house where my brother lives gets a lot of social traffic and folks stop by and use the computer alot. My bro just leaves firefox open to yahoo, and most people (100% windows users) never even notice it's different from before :)

2) An exception to the last part of the above. I was watching football over there on the weekend, and one of the guests who always is on the comp. (and who supports corporate clients with hardware as a job, by the way...) was like "whats this? It's not windows i don't think" I took the time to show him the basic apps (i've locked down gnome pretty good). He was a bit critical, but agreed that he could use it effectively. I shared that it was much more secure than windows (he's actually heard of linux), and i even opened an account for him on the machine. Then he says "its not so great, i can crash it i bet" I said - go ahead....! So i ignore him for awhile and he goes and opens 25 or something firefoxes and spreadsheets and all kinds of other stuff. It did slow down a little bit (it's only a pIII with 256Kram), but he never crashed it..! Im nearly certain he tried to delete files and other stuff - surely he didn't get very far...

3) I caught a rat. This same guy from #2 above is known for using that PC alot. I visited just today and looked at the logs and such (it's still up since i installed it). Nothing out of the ordinary in the logs. But then i check his user account... There's like 25 different .exe files in his /home directory. I check his firefox 'download' manager thingy and sure enough it's him. All kinds of windows 'freeware' useless junk chat programs and such - surely loaded with ad-and-spy-ware-and-whoknowswhat. My brother happens by and says that this guy was on the thing as usual and had commented that the new PC isn't any good, it's not working, some non-sense that you cant run programs.

Anyway, I found out why the windows machine kept getting screwed up!

The main thing is, my bro needs the thing to do email, surfing and spreadsheets. He's quite happy N thats what matters.

Feels, good....!

People are so dumb. Good catch!:)

Smoked :D

Why are you insulting rats?:scratch:

I don't think he was referring to your mother dude, someone else.

Bah-dum-dum-shhhh! I'm here all week people :D

Bet his clients love him going on site... Maybe that's his business plan though - go on site for routine maintenance, pull down as much spy/malware as you can, then charge for removal services ;)

Dear God
 

I can forgive people for using windows, but there is no excuse for those swine who everytime they find a net connection just HAVE to download every bit of shitty freeware in sight, and screw up other people's computers. Then again, it's becuase of my old housemate doing that that I made the change to linux, as my old windows xp installation was full of shitty PSP video converters, and Nokia (cr)apps. The same goes for you and your brother. See - windows is killing itself - becuase so much shite is made for windows, the PC's get screwed, and people look for an alternative. You can't stop the process of evolution.

Congrats on helping your brother out, now go find rat-boy and punish him.

If this isn't a Success Story, I don't know what is! Moved to reflect that. Nice one

Good one.

That is a good story. Where I work we have a problem with people doing this. We use UNIX (Solaris), Linux (Red Hat), and Windows boxes--depending on the department, etc. Some of the people are very knowledgeable and run years at a time without issue. Others--well, the picture is not as pretty. I don't think they are malicious as much as clueless.

Prevention
 

Loved your story, it brings to mind my own.

During my bi-annual "cleansing of the disk" for my sister-in-law, I got fed up with the never ending battle against spyware. "Frack This!" I wiped the thing and put FC4 on it. Being the computer pro she is (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say-no-more), she barely even noticed it was a new OS. A few weeks later I get the frantic call "I can't install AOL instant messenger, I need that to chat with my daughter at college!!!" Uh, you don't need to install that POS - try Applications=>Internet=>gaim. "OOOH NNOOO! They want my resume in word format! Now what do I do?" Uh, file save as, word. PDF? same thing. She loves it, not a pop-up or malware app in sight. Running like a champ as a desktop OS for a complete and total computer illiterate.

Re: Prevention
 

Nice!!

Hello,

Yes I know the problems a XP machine will be down in 1-2 years (only 1 person working in a conservative way (word Internet and so on)). Normally I have installed my machine every 6 months. Now I'am running Linux (SUSE) and there are no problems, I can read e-mail and if I open to fast an attatchment with "xy.doc .exe" there is no problem! It is very easy to use the commandline tools and shell scripts for doing daily jobs (e.g renaming files). Watching movies with xine is much more comfortable as Windows MediaPlayer. Xine can handle all file types, it does not lock the system and it does not send every title you play to M$.

In the next time I will delete the windows partition because I do no longer need it!

RGummi

Yeah, most windows sytems performance and reliability seems to attenuate over time. It's amazing how a re-installation can work wonders. Windows is just so dummied up, along with most of its users. I think a very basic flaw is how systems are set up initially. Most of the time it's pre-installed so no fault to the purchaser. But i think vendors could do a better job.

For example; whenever I set up XP for someone, i always create three partitions. The first is about 20G, which is 'C:' and holds the system and programs. The second is 5G which I configure to contain temporary and swap files (especially the 'temporary internet files' used by explorer) The third, largest partition holds the user data; 'my documents' points there.

By doing this, you can achieve a good deal of separation between the system's files and the user's files. And espeically, the temporary files don't get all mixed in with other chaning data over time. Fragmentation is reduced and recovery is much simpler. Not to mention backups.

Tip: If you ever set up someones' system this way, just do it and dont' try to explain it to them. :)