Hi,

I was wondering which distro would offer me more security and performance? I'm using debian but I hear Solaris has a lot more security features, including a self healing kernel.

I would be using as a webserver, for shared hosting.

Also, is there any simplish to follow securing linux guides that you guys can suggest?

Thanks in advance,

I couldn't help but notice the above statement. It would imply the feature is some sort of artificial intelligence that heals itself when wounded. No such a thing; at least not yet. As for which distro would offer security and performance, it all depends on how you secure/configure the distro. You could have the most secure (by default) operating system and make it the least secure.

As for guides, there are many which I and/or others can provide you, however, the best investment for you is to learn how to get those guides. The efficient method it to search, especially through proper queries. My friend Google is very efficient at providing helpful guides. Good luck.

What Gaz is referring to is Sun's new architecture that is only available in Solaris 10. The info is here:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/

-twantrd

This feature is already available on Solaris 10 running on UltraSPARC processors.

lol, I had a feeling the selfheal feature would throw some of you. Yeah, it's quite a clever feature especially if for some reason the servers kernel is damaged.

I have searched google and I’m currently reading quite a lot of guides, just wondering if you guys could actually recommend any specific site.

No one, as yet, has hacked my Debian box - or I assume so. There are so many ways to hide an infection in linux, where as I feel my windows server, also not been compromised, can be quickly detected when someone attempts or gets in.

I think where the problem is, I need to learn a distro - maybe Debian or Solaris fully. I'm still a bit of a newbie to linux, windows is where I've always been :-( recently doing a Cisco course, and there is quite a bit of UNIX based stuff in there - quite interesting.

Thanks for the input guys.

If your primary goal is security, self healing is not exactly the most adequate answer, self-healing is mainly for large systems reliability.

Security can be addressed in a very powerful manner with Solaris 10 Zones.

As you have been told by others, if security is your goal, and you choose Solaris, you should familiarise yourself with RBAC (role based access control), ipf and Zones (at the very least).

As for which you should use - Debian or Solaris - there is no absolute answer - both can be made very secure, and both Solaris and Debian machines have been compromised in the past. The best that can be said is that Solaris offers some very powerful tools for security, some of which are not available in any other system as yet.
Regards,
Maidros

Well, the term is misleading. The proper term should be something like self correcting kernel. The definition of Self-healing is: Having the power or property of healing itself. A kernel cannot even be classified as having a self. I don't think shiny or illogical terms would help widespread use of Solaris.

Sun documentation do not talk about a Self-Healing Kernel, the proper description is "Predictive Self Healing" and is about hardware, not operating system.

Anyway, why are you thinking a kernel has no "self" ??

Correction:

This term applies too to Software, as Service Management Facility is part of it, so it is actually not restricted to SPARC H/W.

SMF allows service failures to be detected and these faulty services to be restarted automatically, which is in my opinion a proper use of "self healing".