"Popular" protocols comparison

Very unofficial protocols comparison

These conclusions are ENTIRELY the responsibility of me. You can blame me for anything you disagree with.

Protocol		Lan/Internet		Scope		Complexity
HTTP		both pretty safe		fairly universal		fairly simple, great for downloading of static files
FTP		fair for both		diminishing, thankfully		Not “hard” to use, but also not the easiest to set up. Also not particularly secure
TFTP		lan, mostly		obscure		Used mostly for booting diskless workstations. No idea about setup difficulty.
SMB		lan. NOT internet-safe.		Mostly windows, some media players		Sometimes quirky to configure initially, pretty easy to use.
NFS		lan. not recommended for internet		Mostly unix-like		Setup generally fairly simple, both for server and clients. No encryption included
AFP		mostly lan, I think		Mostly Apple		Not sure, never personally tried. Some users have easy success, others, not.
SSH		either. not recommended to expose root account to internet		Mostly unix-like, and windows via programs		Very simple to administer.
RSYNC (over SSH)		Same as SSH		Mostly unix-like console		Very simple to use, no rsync service to configure, only SSH required
RSYNC (module/service)		either, if secured properly		Mostly unix-like, often GUI		A little hard to configure initially.
Torrent		almost entirely internet		fairly universal		Popular for distributing large files to/from large communities. Can be a little challenging to configure initially. Should be fairly easy to use after.
Unison		Not sure, maybe reliant on SSH		mostly unix-like ??		Not sure, kinda tried and failed to use it once. Sorry
iSCSI		lan. internet probably too slow and not safe		growing		Used most often with VMs or diskless workstations. Sometimes hard to configure, but very powerful.
UPnP		Only heard of on lan, thankfully		growing, unfortunately		UPnP, as a concept needs to die in a fire. And manufacturers shouldn't have been so lazy as to add UPnP to their devices and then lie to consumers and say the device is “media ready”.
DAAP/iTunes		probably mostly lan, not sure		apple/windows mostly, I guess		Configuration looks maybe complicated. Not sure, haven't tried.

Originally from documentation/setup_and_user_guide/very_unofficial_protocol_comparison.txt · Last modified: 2014/02/19 14:29 (external edit)  This copy is here as a backup.

Short list of useful Linux distributions

For Desktops:
  Ubuntu (and siblings) - Good hardware detection and configuration.  As a decendent of Debian, has a LOT of packages available.  Also offers the proprietary packages that Debian won't touch.  One weakness I've noticed, is that Ubuntu's Samba is not compatible with Geexbox (see below), not sure why.

For Servers:
  Debian - Excellent for a large number of tasks.
  Ubuntu Server - Almost as good as Debian, and as a decendent of Debian gains almost all of it's strengths, but has the same Samba weakness as Desktop Ubuntu when sharing to Geexbox.
  Gentoo - Phenominal for getting the absolute best out of a machine... if you're willing to put the time in to get the system running, which arguably can be a headache.

For Routers:
  Smoothwall - Great for user friendly setup and maintenance.
  IPCop - Slightly less userfriendly than Smoothwall, but includes more advanced features, which can confuse even me at times.

For Media Players:
  Geexbox - Usable as a customizable live CD.  Can read Samba and NFS file shares, though has difficulty seeing/dealing with Ubuntu based shares (not sure why).
  XBMC Live - Xbox Media Center.  Great of features, but unfortunately requires advanced 3d hardware more advanced than the GeForce2MX that's in my media player box.

For File Serving/Storage:
  FreeNAS - absolutely beautiful, a little detailed to set up, but easy to administer.  Big giant gaping weakness, because it's BSD based, it likes UFS filesystems which don't handle power failures gracefully at all.  Damaged filesystems, machine boots, then goes zombified with trying to make heads or tails of the filesystems.  So to repair the system, you have to boot a different live BSD distro, fix the filesystems, then reboot back into Freenas.  Great for administration... if you never EVER EVER have an unanticipated power failure.

Everything else:
  KNOPPIX - One of the best Live CD's ever.  Without KNOPPIX, I'd probably still be fighting Windows every day to get anything done.  Excellent for learning and getting comfortable with Linux before taking the big step of doing a full install.  Also great for bringing a system up for doing repairs or just to copy information from the hard drives to somewhere else on the network.

Why I use Linux

Recently, this comment was made to my previous post.

Yakiniku said...
Let me be the first to say that you dress funny and Linux stinks!
7:32 AM

In response, I'll explain my reasoning for moving away from Windows.
I had seen and started using KNOPPIX in doing random repair operations on systems for which Windows had fallen apart, and recent drivers with which to rebuild the system hadn't been backed up. Shortly after that, my machine started to exhibit an annoying reboot/shutdown bug in which the machine would perform all the actions of a reboot/shutdown except for actually triggering the hardware action to reboot or shutdown, so the machine would be stuck on a blank desktop with a frozen cursor until I actually pushed either the power or reset button to get the job done. So that's strike 1.
I had further trouble with necessary components of Windows checking out midweek for a long weekend and then deciding not to check back in. So, the only option was to erase the OS partition and reload the operating system. The big massive downside to that is that each reload is pretty much a full day operation.

OS reload, 1 hour.
Retweak settings and reload drivers, 2 hours.
Load "critical updates", 2 hours (dispite broadband).
Reload software and retweak, 4 hours+.

So, in order to get back online and web banking (which is important to me), I'm kept facing 5+ hour turn around times, and 9+ hours for a full reinstall. That's a very big waste of time. So, being annoyed by needing to do web banking and having to spend so much effort each time I needed to reload the OS, I started using KNOPPIX as a temporary measure to do the web banking and Paypal stuff I needed to do instead of spending the time to reload Windows. So, I started flipping and flopping back and forth between Windows and KNOPPIX. I started spending more and more time using KNOPPIX because it was much harder to accidentally break things and have to reload the OS. At one point, I noticed that I had spent 3 weeks using KNOPPIX and hadn't felt any need to go back to Windows. So, between the annoying need to do "critical updates" to do web banking and the annoying reload times, that was strike 2 and 3 for Windows. Since then, I've used several versions of Linux, each with different strengths and weaknesses, but all of them reload quickly, are much more stable than Windows, come with banking level encryption onboard, and and don't suffer annoying reboot/shutdown bugs. This makes all of them far superior to Windows in my mind.

Here's a short list of the Linux distros that I have used:
KNOPPIX - Live CD based Linux. Very handy and useful.
Slax - Like KNOPPIX, but based on Slackware
Debian - The Distribution on which KNOPPIX is based. Also very useful for headless boxes and/or servers
Redhat (v9 and Fedora Core 2) - Good beginner distro
Mandriva - Another good beginner distro, but different.