Having installed Mandrake (v7-9.1) about 30-40 times on various boxes in both personal roles and for professional use - including high security roles, I would offer that my initial reactions to these issues were similar to those of your friend.
I'd run into one or another of the issues mentioned below and get discouraged. Many times, I'd find myself on distrowatch and FreeBSD's site considering changing. But each time this happened, I thought I'd challenge myself to learn one more thing about mdk before switching. As an example, I became frustrated several times with the amount of 'stuff' that got installed w/ mdk. I experimented with minimal installs and spending literally hours researching and selecting only those packages in the install that I really needed. One of these attempts left me with a system that ran very well with only a P200, 48MB RAM, and a 6GB disk. But I found that adding new apps later required much more tweaking (and reading) to get running correctly than if I had just let mdk install them in the first place. Research and experimentation told me that doing a larger (though not full) install and then removing extra packages gave me the best results as far as functionality and easy of use/installation. RPM database corruption is another issue I've run across. As maddening as it is, it can be resolved. And the documentation on the security models could definitely be improved, especially at install, but it (and all the individual settings that make up each level) are so easy to customize afterward, that I don't see it as a major problem. Obviously, it's up to your friend/company to decide which distro is best and why. Best wishes, Brandon > 1. We're sick of RPM. We've hard RPM break on a few machines already (I > think the RPM database becomes corrupted if I remember correctly). > Needless to say, it's hard to upgrade your machine when your package > manager goes kaput. APT/debs are SO much easier to deal with anyway. > > 2. Too much crap! Literally, Mandrake has TOO MUCH crap these days. I > know Debian is hardly innocent, but the dependency train for whatever > reason seems to be much more palatable when using Debian as opposed to > Mandrake. Maybe it's all the package/package-dev combo packs that the > Mandrake/RedHat people like, I'm not entirely sure. It's just too much > honestly. Let me install mySQL and be done with it. > > 3. The big reason (for me personally), the Mandrake security model is > totally whack. Once upon a time, Mandrake used to just run a nightly > script which would email an audit of your system to the Administrator > letting you know what was wrong. That's all it did, and that was nice. > Now there's a set of different (horribly documented) security models > that have all sorts of (horribly documented) behavior. I don't mind the > security model idea, what I do mind is my system doing things for me > (such as changing file permissions) without being explicitly told when > and why this is going to happen. This has caused major problems for us > on a few occasions and it's simply unacceptable. Maybe we haven't looked > in the right place for the documentation, but I've tried to find it in > the past with little success. I should have to go reading scripts to > find this out. > > What I've found is that with Debian I have a much better idea what's > going on inside our systems. There are no surprises, things so far just > straight up work the way we expect them to. We're competent programmers > and system administrators, so this is great for us. If I were a newbie, > I would definitely still recommend Mandrake. Whatever the security > scripts are doing, it IS making the system more secure, but sometimes > you don't want that. > > If I wanted Mandrake to do one thing (short of switching to > .debs) to get me back on the Mandrake train: Please explain in > absolutely explicit detail the difference between your security modes. > You *HAVE* to do this during the install process as well. If I'm > rebuilding my firewall, for instance, I don't have the option to go out > to the internet to find out what these things mean. This is a very > important critical decision that should not be taken lightly. The only > way we can properly make that decision is if the knowlege is made > available to us when we need it most. > > > > > >
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