On 12/23/11 5:39 PM, John Baldwin wrote: > On Friday, December 23, 2011 11:07:56 am Damien Fleuriot wrote: >> Hey up list, >> >> >> >> Look, just a rant here. >> >> >> Who in *HELL* thought it would be a cool idea to release no less than >> FOUR security advisories today ? >> >> I mean, couldn't this have waited and remained undisclosed until monday ? >> >> I for one do *NOT* relish the idea of updating 50+ boxes this evening >> and tomorrow ! >> >> >> Not to mention a whole lot of merchants and banks have toggled IT Freeze >> a few weeks ago, to ensure xmas shopping doesn't get disturbed by >> production changes. >> >> >> Seriously, this is just irritating. > > From an e-mail sent to security@ from the security officer: > > <quote> > Hi all, > > No, the Grinch didn't steal the FreeBSD security officer GPG key, and your > eyes > aren't deceiving you: We really did just send out 5 security advisories. > > The timing, to put it bluntly, sucks. We normally aim to release advisories > on > Wednesdays in order to maximize the number of system administrators who will > be > at work already; and we try very hard to avoid issuing advisories any time > close > to holidays for the same reason. The start of the Christmas weekend -- in > some > parts of the world it's already Saturday -- is absolutely not when we want to > be > releasing security advisories. > > Unfortunately my hand was forced: One of the issues (FreeBSD-SA-11:08.telnetd) > is a remote root vulnerability which is being actively exploited in the wild; > bugs really don't come any worse than this. On the positive side, most people > have moved past telnet and on to SSH by now; but this is still not an issue we > could postpone until a more convenient time. > > While I'm writing, a note to freebsd-update users: FreeBSD-SA-11:07.chroot > has a > rather messy fix involving adding a new interface to libc; this has the > awkward > side effect of causing the sizes of some "symbols" (aka. functions) in libc to > change, resulting in cascading changes into many binaries. The long list of > updated files is irritating, but isn't a sign that anything in freebsd-update > went wrong. > </quote> >
At least they're aware the timing sucks completely and feel as sorry as us. Ty John. _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
