Ubuntu Rocks

Yeah, I took the plunge at work on one of my production machines whose Windows install finally gave up the ghost. It may have had something to do with the fact that it was a 4 year old install. Then again, it may also have had something to do with the fact that it was a Microsoft product.

I went with Version 6 (Dapper Drake) and installation couldn't have been easier. I went with a LAMP install, then layered Desktop on top of it. Workin' well so far.

Shortly after I got it setup, someone at the office made a router change and let the whole world onto our LAN. Of course we got infected with all sorts of crap, and several machines were spamming the network to the point where not only could we not connect to the internet, but we were having a damn hard time connecting to any of our internal resources as well. Enter Ubuntu...

I'd installed EtherApe, Ethereal, NMap, NMapFE, and some other tools when I set up my box. Ethereal and EtherApe came in right handy, as we were able to isolate the machines that were flooding the network right fast. Of course, it's one thing to know the IP address and hostname of the offending machines, and it's another machine to find the actual machines in our building. But after a brief interlude of an hour or so, we had the zombies isolated.

Once we could access the rest of the world from our computers and a quick installation of Nessus via Ubuntu's Synaptics Package Manager later, we were able to scan all our internal resources for open ports, known exploits, etc... Pretty freekin' cool.

I did make the mistake of telling the Engineering Manager about Nessus and showed him the preliminary scan results. He got pretty excited and wanted wanted to appropriate my computer and use it to run scheduled Nessus scans on our network resources. This really bummed me out. Fortunately, Nessus installs just fine on Max OS X...so I was able to keep my Ubuntu right where it belongs: with me. Now we'll be running Nessus scans more-or-less regularly and will hopefully catch any dramatic changes to any of the machines on our network before disaster strikes.

Inspired by my success with Ubuntu at the office, I also installed it on my laptop at home. This time, nothing complicated... just the standard desktop version. What can I say, it detected my wireless NIC with no fiddling around. Something, I might add, that SuSe was never able to do. With only 256MB RAM, the ol' laptop was just barely able to run WinXP Pro. If I remember correctly, I had to jump through some hoops just to get it to install. With Ubuntu it just works. Mind you, it didn't magically transform the machine into some sort of speed demon, but I'm able to browse the web, use Writely, run MediaWiki, Nessus, Apache2, etc... without a hitch. More then 10 tabs in Firefox and it starts to bog down pretty severely, but that's no surprise. Firefox is known for it's memory leaks and whatnot. I find that if closing Firefox doesn't do the trick, simply logging out and back in to the desktop restores everything.

So that's my take on things. I know that Ubuntu has received a lot of hype of late, and it's become trendy to blog about how great it is... but at least for this user, it lives up to the hype of simplicity, reliability, and power.