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Yeah...the "Rat" could have used just a little discretion. I can't integrate his OS into a production environment with them expecting the end user to essentially rebuild the OS from sources. They'll never end up getting any sizeable usage audience. Besides, FreeBSD does everything OpenBSD does.

I understand what you're saying about third party firewalls, but those firewalls MUST use the APIs that MS provides them. I've used those APIs before and it's like programming through a "keyhole". You're left with the definite impression that there's more available then what they're giving you, or worse...what you might be "giving" somebody else. I don't trust them, and they give me no good reason to trust them.

I might try OpenSolaris, but we've been running Debian Linux on all of our custom application servers, and RedHat Enterprise 4 on those that aren't custom. The Sparc 64 port of Debian loads up on my older Netra T1-105s, E250s and E220s in the lab, but "looks" like the same Debian Linux that runs on the Intel based servers.

But thanks for letting me know about OpenSolaris! :-)

We have multiple other methods in place for tracking network traffic and nothing unexpected is going out that I’ve ever seen, and I can’t imagine we would be directed from the highest levels to standardize on MS products like we have been either if they were secretly transmitting information from behind our perimeter to outside parties. With all respect you’ll have to come up with some other evidence before I’ll believe it’s happening, because my experience is to the contrary. Windows systems can be secured just as good as any other O/S with the right people managing them, the users well trained and operating without admin privileges, etc, just as any other operating system is insecure without proper setup/management and being controlled by untrained users.

I’ve been here since everything was VMS and many flavors of Unix, but we’ve migrated almost everything to Windows and things have never run better. The programmers (who now like to be called “developers” instead LOL) really seem to like the Microsoft programming tools better too, we used to do lots of Java based programming and run the webservers on Sun and databases on Oracle, but it’s all Microsoft now and there’s not a person here who’d like to change back. Competition for Microsoft is good, but I’d just prefer it be American owned companies and not based on free clones from Europe or US socialists, which is how I view Linux.