That is certainly correct for Servers on a production network, but having a
single Vista client on a College network may actually allow the user to find
and report some bugs with Vista that may interfere with the client's usage of
Applications on your network (for registration and whatnot) so that they can be
fixed before Microsoft releases the OS to the general public and you have
thousands of computers plugged into your network that will not work with the
existing infrastructure.
As far as the security goes in Longhorn; it is a priority for the development
team, with features such as low-rights Internet Explorer and User Access
Protection (similar to sudo on the Linux side) whereby users are not
administrators by default, and even admin accounts have reduced privileges.
On the other side of the argument, however, none of the Antivirus programs (at
least that I have tried) work with the Vista Beta, so if that is a requirement
for logging on to your network, he may be out of luck.
Just my 2 cents...
-Sean
On Wednesday, September 28, 2005, at 03:32PM, Micheal Espinola Jr
<michealespinola@gmail.com> wrote:
Beta software should not be allowed to run unchecked in a production
environment.
On 9/27/05, Jon Lawhead <samurai@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Greetings all,
I work in Network Security for UC Berkeley's residence halls. We have a
list of several "minimum
security standards" that we require all connected computers to meet before
being allowed access to
the network (stuff like having a firewall program, antivirus, etc). One of
the standards involves
having the latest patched version of a secure operating system. I have a
user on the network who
wishes to run a (legitimately acquired, or so he says) version of Windows
Vista beta version.
Before I decide on this, I wanted opinions on whether or not this is a good
idea. My first
instinct is to disallow any beta operating systems simply on the grounds
that they'll be buggy by
definition and may potentially have serious security flaws, but I can't find
anything to back this
up. Just wondering if I could get a few opinions on whether or not this is
a good idea. Thanks!
Jon Lawhead
Network Security Coordinator
Residential Computing
University of California, Berkeley
