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posted by
LaminatorX
on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:30AM
from the unplugging-the-network-cable dept.
from the unplugging-the-network-cable dept.
Appalbarry writes:
"Microsoft is about to abandon Windows XP to the wolves. Fair enough it's ancient. However, there are still going to be a lot of XP boxes out there, and a fair number of them are unlikely to ever get upgraded until the hardware dies.
My question is: what's available to help make this old OS stay reasonably secure and safe for the people who can't or won't abandon it?
Over the years I've been through Central Point Antivirus, Norton, McAfee, AVG, stuff like Zone Alarm, and of course the various Microsoft anti-malware offerings. But since moving over to Linux I really haven't kept up on the wild and wonderful world of Windows security tools.
Suggestions?"
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:52PM
To the editor: excellent story for discussion... timely AND nerd-y!
Background: I have a little 1GHz / 1GB 32-bit netbook and a 1-2GHz / 1.25 GB 64-bit athlon. Both are running XP-Home/SP3.
Problem: As much as I would *like* to move to linux or BSD or the like, I have literally *hundreds* of batch programs (foo.bat or foo.cmd) that I've written over the past 20 years. I use these regularly.
I sense my short-term best option is to get a new machine with Win 7 on it, and port my tools to that. Later, I can look to porting it all to a linux-like environment.
Question:Have any of you found yourself in the same position? What did you do?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lentilla on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:32PM
This will be your experience whilst ever you stay with Windows. Let's say you port to Windows 7. In ten years time you will have THIRTY years worth of batch files, will be worrying about porting to Windows 13 and will be considering "moving to Linux".
The only way to circumvent this "Groundhog Day" of computing is to make the break - waiting will only make the switch more complex and will make the cost higher (as you write more scripts).
If I were you and I really wanted to ditch Windows? I'd do it as soon as possible. Put your existing installation into a virtual machine and run any "mission critical" scripts from there. Force yourself to do day-to-day tasks in the new OS.
The only way to break the addiction is to stop feeding it. I guarantee that if this is what you actually want you will not regret making the leap.
One last piece: when you buy a new computer, resist the urge to "try out" the new version of Windows. Nuke it immediately. Install it as a virtual machine if you must but don't make the mistake of thinking "I'll just try it out...".
(Score: 1) by WizardFusion on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:42PM
Every single time I buy a new machine I nuke it anyway and install Windows from my TechNet licence. I don't want all the crap that comes with a new machine
(Score: 1) by denmarkw00t on Wednesday March 05 2014, @06:25PM
The only way to break the addiction is to stop feeding it.
Precisely. The original question in the summary of "What should I do to keep XP going" is the wrong question all together. No one should be doing anything to keep XP going if MS is dropping it - honestly. The fact of it is, if you don't move on you'll get bit at some point - I'm almost willing to put up money that someone out there is sitting on an exploit and waiting to release it a few months after XP is "dead" and then they'll have a nice little set of pwnd boxes spanning 50% of desktops in the world.
buck feta
(Score: 2) by jt on Wednesday March 05 2014, @11:38PM
Agreed - the longer you leave it, the bigger the job. Might as well get on with it.
Three paths to consider.
1. Stick with Windows but move to Win7 and port your scripts to Powershell. It's a world away from command.com and surprisingly powerful.
2. Move over to the free world and port your scripts to ksh/bash/whatever. I don't know what your scripts do, but the old Windows batch language is not exactly awash with advanced features unavailable in *nix shells.
3. Start transitioning to a shell or scripting language like Python, one script at a time, in your current working environment. Do one at a time to keep confidence that the ecosystem still works. Before long you'll find you've ported the whole lot, and are now platform independent.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday March 06 2014, @02:07PM
jt (2890) wrote:
I'm in agreement with that.
Have considered this but when last I looked, the powershell I found available for what I have (XP-home/SP3) is limited, and I'd rather not add further entanglements to the windows environment... would make it even harder to transition away in the future.
That would be ideal. I'm familiar with the Unix command environment and have experience with bash, so I like that idea. Several years ago I found a bash implementation that ran under windows: win-bash [sourceforge.net] but it looks like it has not been maintained???
Does anyone here have experience with this? I'm curious as to how stable, solid, and compatible it is with what I'd find under the various distros out there.
I agree that would be the idea solution. I just re-downloaded win-bash and will play around with it a bit.
If anyone here has experience with other compatible shells they could recommend, I'd love to hear about it!
Thanks for the suggestions!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday March 06 2014, @02:22PM
lentilla (1770) wrote:
Excellent point. That's exactly where I'm at.
At the moment, running in a VM is not an option on my current system. Don't have the compute power or memory to handle it. I'm in the market for a new box and will definitely keep this in mind.
Makes sense to me.... thanks for summing it up so succinctly.
Duly noted! Thanks for the feedback. I guess my hangup is finding a distro that has some staying power (e.g. no gratuitous UI changes), and that is supported on whatever new box I get.
I'm leaning towards a laptop and am open to hearing people's experiences with running Linux on their system. I've heard various things about driver support, especially with respect to video AMD vs NVidia.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1) by etherscythe on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:55PM
Might be helpful to see exactly what you're doing with them. Much of the command structure is the same from XP to 7 (if anything there are more options now). You can even port to Bash by taking the commands that Linux does not have and simply making an alias to the rough equivalent (DIR>LS for example) in many cases, depending how complex it is.
I wrote a script, for example, that allows me to use OEM activation certificates and SLP keys to activate Windows XP, Vista and 7 on client computers with a fresh reload. It works pretty universally across all of them except where the back-end activation (SLMGR) does not exist on certain platforms (XP). I converted it to an EXE file, but that was mainly for ease of including all the certificate files into an easy, uncluttered format (single .exe file rather than dozens of xrm-ms files and a few bat files).
If nothing else, there is DOSBox, which I even have running on my N900.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday March 06 2014, @01:33PM
etherscythe (937) wrote:
Fantastic point! And probably no simple answer. To complicate matters, over the years I've installed several Unix command utilities and have integrated these into my batch programs, too. I tried cygwin but the install broke and messed up my system. Then I found GNU coreutils, fsutils, and updates to them. Then discovered GnuWin32. Still later found ezwinports. So I've got quite the frankenstein environment there. Have not yet found a stable command-line shell (like bash) that I could run things with, so just kept plugging along with CMD.EXE, such as it is.
I'm open to suggestions for a stable port of, say, bash that I could migrate over to on windows, and then run them *unchanged* on a linux host. It's been a while since I looked and am hoping the community here my be able to offer recommendations.
Never tried DOSBox; sounds interesting! OTOH, I've turned on command extensions and take advantage of them in many places. I've used PC/MS DOS since version 3.0, so I'm sure I could adapt, eventually, but would like to know how far its support goes to emulating what I've got now.
I'm interested in people's experiences and pointers.
Thanks so much for the feedback!
Wit is intellect, dancing.