A recent post on the Errata Security Blog describing the Ubuntu low-mem install for VMs got me thinking on something that's bugged me for a while now. First off, kudos to Ubuntu for identifying the need for this feature and providing this option. But this begs the question, what is in that 420MB of storage and ~510MB of RAM usage? I can't wait to take this for a test drive and compare default systems. I wonder how many of those background services are really needed, and how many are just fluff. What is the security risk of all that fluff?
For those who have not caught on yet, the name of this blog is "Scalable". Look it up. A lot of time, people in IT don't understand the power of scaling DOWN. It reminded me of a tweet that I've kept in my favorites:
No it doesn't. Your stuff does not "scale well" if it only scales up, but not down.
— Jack Daniel (@jack_daniel) March 24, 2010
I'm a Gentoo Junkie myself. Being a programmer by trade makes using Gentoo, and more specifically the Portage system, very powerful and flexible. There's just no better feeling than taking a system image, performing a complete update, and finding out that I still have the same functionality and the image has dropped by 100MB. This lowers my support time/costs. There's fewer things that can go wrong with the software being there's less pieces to break. The system tends to perform better. And I'm reducing the attack surface of the system.
This is always the first issue with a security audit. Find the services and software on the system that you don't use/need and disable them or uninstall them completely. A lot of Linux Distributions are very flexible with package installations. But I'm always shocked by desktop oriented distributions, like Ubuntu. It's hard to trust a system when a 'pstree' scrolls for three screens.
No comments:
Post a Comment