Re: Xandros and Micro$oft ?
- From: BearItAll <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:02:02 +0100
Linonut wrote:
After takin' a swig o' grog, BearItAll belched out this bit o' wisdom:http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/04/03/vista-users-beware-of-the-firewall
Pretty good plan by MS I would say, ignore the bulk of Linux, it's enough
to cripple those most likely to damage to MS. Buy themselves time to get
a working Vista out there and then what with the final nasty MS has on
Vista, then Linux growth is pretty much scuppered for a time.
The final nasty? What could that be? (I hear you ask). Well I have a
Vista laptop here on my desk that was the first of the new machines I had
to buy for here since Vista came out. Did you know that it comes with an
altered (in MS words 'improved' tcp? It can find approximately half of my
network but can not log in. Basically it can do everything that involves
other packet types, initiated from the DHCP server, internet traffic,
other network protocols, but it can not do anything at all that has to do
with the traffic from my UNIX and Linux servers.
Online the work around for this is to load the XP packet managers, I
haven't got as far as loading those yet.
But the point is that this Vista out of the box is not friendly to
standard tcp network traffic. It is Vista Ultimate, which means it should
do everything, so don't MS folk come on here saying I have the wrong
version.
I'm pissed off because I needed a quick machine that I could send to a
rep today, now I'm losing time, first in finding that MS is broken in
this respect and second because I have to make sure this switch to XP tcp
manager is actually going to work.
It's not just Linux that gets boggled. How about your hardware
firewalls?
By default, the Receive Window Auto-Tuning feature in Windows
Vista uses a Window Scaling factor of 8 for non-HTTP
connections. This issue does not occur when you try to make an
HTTP connection.
(I guess this means that downloading over FTP is a lot faster
than downloading over HTTP with Vista.)
And lo and behold: many firewalls, including expensive,
commercial ones, don't look at the window scale option. When
they find that the resulting TCP behavior deviates from the
original specification, they filter the packets involved.
According to the article, (some) products from the following
vendors can be problematic: NetApp, Cisco, Sonicwall, and
Checkpoint. I do remember seeing problems with Linux/UNIX
firewalling packages as well, though. See the article for
workarounds on Vista. On Linux and BSD, you may have to look for
related sysctl settings if you experience this problem.
That sounds very right, I hadn't come across this in my search. I can't
think of an easy way around it.
The fix is talking of allowing all tcp ip traffic, that takes away the
fundamental security areas of tcp ip.
Last night I tried to put XP on the machine I have here, but there is some
change in the area of the drives too, the XP installer said it doesn't have
any drives, so I put my trusty Live Linux in to format them for it, but it
too could not find any hard drives on the laptop.
MS are doing battle against Linux on many fronts, taking key players such as
Novell and anyone else willing to jump onboard with them, it seems that
they are doing battle in the area of Bios too and Gateway Computers are
happy to go along with it too. I can apparently get a bios flash so that I
can format the drives for a non-Vista system, but after a search I didn't
come up with that flash.
.
- References:
- Re: Xandros and Micro$oft ?
- From: BearItAll
- Re: Xandros and Micro$oft ?
- From: Linonut
- Re: Xandros and Micro$oft ?
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