[Zope-Coders] new zLOG

[R. David Murray]

On 27 Nov 2002, Chris McDonough wrote:
> I recognize that this is not best practice as far as security goes, but
> I think the responsibility is still in the right place:  the sysadmin
> must secure the installation to the best of his ability.  As long as we
> inform them of the risk of keeping the default settings, I think our job
> is done.
>
> dissent?

In particular, no.  I understand that this is a hard problem to solve
in a cross-platform way.

As a general principle, though, I do disagree.  Yes, technically
it is the sysadmin's responsability to secure his system appropriately.
But a *lot* of the trouble we have in the Internet security world
comes from the fact that this attitude is the norm, and a lot of
inexperienced or incompetent sysadmins use the defaults and end up
with vulnerable systems ("you need to change the default password
on the database administrator's account" comes to mind here).  *This*
particular issue is not a huge one, since it has to do with forensic
support rather than 'lock the door' support; so I don't see any
problem with the proposed (not-as-secure-by-default) solution
in this case.

But in general I believe that all software should install by default
in the most secure manner possible, and the docs should explain how
to *relax* the security if the sysadmin deems it appropriate.

--RDM