jchimim - "Red Hat's up to 7.X now..."

And living on Linux 2.4 or 2.5 kernels. Probably 2.4 given 2.5's problems. When discussing "Linux" it is only possible to discuss the kernel itself, not the revision number of each distribution.

**jchimim - ** "At one position, we had a solaris machine that had been up over two years. It was acting an an RLOGIN/DNS/TFTP server. There's no point in upgrading a machine that's doing it's job."

Of course not - and that's fine as long as your willing to accept the risks of having the unpatched holes. But I can guarantee you that there have been exploits for that system that have been patched in those 2 years. Hopefully that's not a problem for that box :: shrugs :: impossible for me to say.

Along those lines, we have Windows NT servers here that have never once crashed in all the time they are in service, often for years. While the uptime is not that long because we routinely maintain the systems the reality is we could simply leave them running and uptimes of years would be trivial to achieve.

The point is that there is nothing inherent in Linux or Unix that is more stable these days ... not since Windows NT 4.5 and certainly not since 2000.

**jchimim - ** "Would you feel more comfortable with air traffic controllers relying on a Solaris platform or a Windows XP platform?."

I wouldn't worry about it one way or the other to be honest. I would be much more interested in the stability of the application code running on the system itself. I do know I wouldn't put it on a Linux system - there is way too much code int here that has never had a serious Q&A review.

jchimim - "easy to administer is the key to choosing windows over unix. Windows administrators are easier to find and less expensive to pay than Unix administrators."

Well actually the key is application availability and a vastly superior set of development tools... not to mention a fairly low total cost of ownership and great support from multiple vendors.

Administrators are not a problem in either case.. the number of Linux/Unix people out there who will admin boxes for Pizza is fairly high. There is no real need to pay Unix admins more than Windows admins these days - it used to be so when Unix/Linux skills were rare - but that simply isn't the case.

Of course, good admins in either OS are able to demand more money - and most of the good ones can admin either system :)

Roy G - "I would imagine running an executable file on any other OS would be equally risky. Firewalls cannot be relied on to catch these things. After the program is up and running, it could disable your firewall, disable Virus detection, then do whatever it wants, because you have given it control."

If you are happy with a little extra trouble under Windows AND Linux you can avoid this. Simply do not give your everyday work login access to change those files. That way you would have to actively login or "Run As" an administrator to do so... running a Trojan under your normal account would not let it hurt that way because it wouldn't have access.