tlug: Bastille Linux

[Austin Kurahone <austin@example.com>]

Ok, since Jonathan asked, I just went over to their site and gave a quick look
at what it is and etc.

>Has anyone worked with Bastille?  Is it really so
>distro/version-specific that a given Bastille works only on the Red Hat
>version it's written for?  If so, how much work would be needed to
>modify it to work with other distros?

Please note that I haven't worked on Bastille at all, so what follows 
should be taken with a grain of salt.  First of all on to what Bastille
is.  From cruising the site it apears that it is a hardening script that 
attemps to replace a security aware (read with a clue) sysadmin going 
through the hardening process with a shellscript. (Brings to mind the quote
"Go away or I will replace you with a very small shellscript" or something
to that effect.)

Supposedly it works with limited sucsess on Mandrake, but since Madrake
is basically redhat + modifications, no suprises there.  I would think that
it wouldn't require that much work to get it to work on different ditros,
dependent in this canse not on what glibc/kernel revision it happens to
run, but on how close it is to that bloated mess of e-vile that we call
redhat. (I will be willing to take a further look into this at the peril
of my sanity for a small financial contribution ;-)

For a list of stuff that it can harden for you:
http://bastille-linux.sourceforge.net/beta.html

<RANT>
Please be realistic though, entrusting the security of your box to a script!?!?!?
</RANT>

Yours,

-- 
Austin K. Kurahone
Tokyo Linux Users Group / Green Frog Linux Maintainer
"Most of the star treks always felt like they assumed that going into
space would unite humanity. Babylon 5 went with the idea that... 
'ooo, space' and life moved on."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Technical Meeting: May 13 (Sat) 13:30 Temple University Japan
* Topic: Crypto and Security	Speaker: Chris Sekiya
Next Nomikai Meeting: June 16 (Fri), Tengu TokyoEkiMae.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://www.tlug.gr.jp        Sponsor: Global Online Japan