Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 18:47:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Roger Marquis <marquis@roble.com> To: security@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ftpd bug in FreeBSD through at least 3.4 Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.96.1001002183337.17394A-100000@roble2.roble.com>
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>OS revisions are a fact of life, but since 4v0 was just released in >April and took some time to get to 4v1 (never trust %d.0 releases), I >would have expected a bit more support. Sometimes CVS isn't the answer >- like the 2v2r8 release firewall one of my cheaper clients has. We are >going to put a 4v1r1 box in place of it, but usually replacement is a >pain. - Jy@ OS upgrades are far more difficult than patches, both in terms of downtime and in terms of backwards compatibility. Operating Systems like FreeBSD, lacking much in the way of backwards compatibility, must be babied through frequent upgrades with lots of skilled systems administration. This runs contrary to systems administration principle #2: work smarter not harder. Commercial Unix vendors like Sun, on the other hand, only need to be upgraded every few years thanks to their extensive patch support. Backwards compatibility is often maintained across several major revisions saving hundreds of hours of maintenance in some cases. We're still using some Sun binaries compiled 10 and 11 years ago! Think of how many times you've had to recompiled FreeBSD binaries in just the last couple of years. The 3.3 ftpd is barely months old much less years. Takes a lot of the "free" out of FreeBSD. See http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/pub-cgi/show.pl?target=patches/patch-access for Solaris' list of supported releases going back to 2.3 (1994). -- Roger Marquis Roble Systems Consulting http://www.roble.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message
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