Last year, my household quit cable TV. The transition wasn’t without its hiccups. But leaving cable has had some great benefits. First, we are paying less money per month. Second, we are watching less TV per month. Third, I have learned a whole lot of things about streaming technologies and about over-the-air (OTA) TV options. Last year was also the year that I put a home automation program into effect. But both of these initiatives were done in 2018. Now I’ve decided that security and Windows minimization will be the key household technology initiatives for 2019.
How Big Is Your Threat Surface?
What is “Windows minimization”? That is simple. “Windows minimization” is the intentional reduction of Windows instances within your organization. Microsoft Windows used to be the platform for innovation and commercialization. Now it is the platform for running legacy systems. Like mainframes and mini-computers before them, Windows is no longer the “go to” platform for new development. C# and .Net are no longer the environment for new applications. And SQL server never was the “go to” platform for most databases. And if you look at the total number of shipped operating systems, it is clear that Android and IOS have clearly become the only significant operating systems on the mobile platform.
Nevertheless, Microsoft products remain the most vulnerable operating system products (based upon the total number of published CVE alerts). Adobe remains the most vulnerable “application” product family. But these numbers only reflect the total number of “announced” vulnerabilities. They don’t take the total number of deployed or exploited systems into account. Based upon deployed instances, Android and iOS remain the most exploited platforms.
Microsoft’s vulnerable status isn’t because their products are inherently less safe. To be candid, all networked computing platforms are unsafe. But given the previous predominance of Windows, Microsoft technologies were the obvious target for most malware developers.
Of course, Windows dominance is no longer the case. Most people do the majority of their casual computing on their phones – which use either Linux (Android) or Unix (iOS). And while Microsoft’s Azure platform is a fine web/cloud platform, most cloud services use Linux and/or cloud services like OpenStack or AWS. So the demand for Windows is declining while the security of all other platforms is rapidly improving.
The Real Reason For Migrating
It is possible to harden your Windows systems. And it is possible to fail to harden your Linux systems. However, it is not possible to easily port a product from one OS to another – unless the software vendor did that for you already. In most cases, if the product you want isn’t on the platform that you use, then you either need to switch your operating platform or you need to convince your software supplier to support your platform.
Heading To The Tipping Point
It is for this reason that I have undertaken this Windows minimization project. New products are emerging every day. Most of them are not on Windows. They are on alternative platforms. Every day, I find a new widget that won’t run on Windows. Of course, I can always run a different operating system on a Windows-host. But once the majority of my applications run on Linux, then it will make more sense to run a Linux-hosted vitualization platform and host a Windows guest system for the legacy apps.
And I am rapidly nearing that point. My Home Assistant runs on a Raspberry Pi. It has eleven application containers running within Docker (on HassOS). My DNS system runs on a Raspberry Pi. My OpenVPN system is hosted on a Pi.
Legacy Anchors
But a large number of legacy components remain on Windows. Cindy and I use Microsoft Office for general documents – though PDF documents from LibreOffice are starting to increase their share of total documents created. My podcasting platform (for my as yet unlaunched podcast) runs on Windows. And my Plex Media Server (PMS) runs on Windows.
Fortunately, PMS runs on Linux. So I built am Ubuntu 18.10 system to run on VirtualBox. And just as expected, it works flawlessly. Yes, I had to figure a few things out along the way – like using the right CIFS file system to access my NAS. But once I figured these minor tweaks out, I loaded all of my movies onto the new Plex server. I fully expect that once I transition my remaining apps, I’ll turn my Windows Server into an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server.
Final Takeaways
I have taken my first steps. I’ve proven that Plex will run on Linux. I know that I can convert mobile print services from Windows to Linux. And I can certainly run miscellaneous apps (like TurboTax) on a Windows guest running on Linux. But I want to be sure before I convert my Windows server to Linux. So I will need to complete a software usage survey and build my data migration plan
I wonder how long it will be before I flip the switch – once and for all.
I probably wasn’t clear on one thing: my intent is to eventually eliminate all uses of Windows. That includes stopping its use as a host for my Linux instances; I will be eliminating Windows as a bare metal OS. Instead, I’ll be running Linux as a host while running various Linux distros (and Windows) as guests. But that will take another few weeks. I’ll have to carve out the time for the migration to occur.