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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The developers of FreeBSD have announced they'll change the way they go about their business, after users queried why known vulnerabilities weren't being communicated to users.
This story starts with an anonymous GitHub post detailing some vulnerabilities in the OS, specifically in freebsd-update, libarchive, bspatch and portsnap. Some of the problems in that post were verified and the FreeBSD devs started working on repairs.
But over on the FreeBSD security list, threads like this started asking why users weren't being told much about the bugs or remediation efforts. That's a fair question because updating FreeBSD could in some circumstances actually expose users to the problem.
Now the FreeBSD team has answered those questions by saying “As a general rule, the FreeBSD Security Officer does not announce vulnerabilities for which there is no released patch.”
The operating system's developers and security team are now “reviewing this policy for cases where a proof-of-concept or working exploit is already public.”
That post also explains that the team is considering more detailed security advisories. There's also an admission that the proposed patch may have broken other things in the OS.
The post concludes by saying that the FreeBSB core and security teams are working with all due haste to fix things and will let those subscribed to its mailing lists know when patches are ready and the danger is past.
[The majority of SoylentNews.org's servers run Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Long Term Stable version). Upgrading to version 16.04 LTS would expose our systems to systemd and there has been some discussion among staff about our options. One option under consideration would be FreeBSD. Are there any Soylentils who run FreeBSD? What has your experience been? Any surprises to share with the community? --martyb]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday August 12 2016, @03:18PM
I'm using Devuan exclusively for laptop and server.
It works.
It was an easy upgrade from Debian wheezy to Devuan jessie -- just replace a few lines in /etc/apt/sources.list, upgrade apt and maybe a few tools, then everything. I had a complete bootable system backup just in case, but I never needed it.
From Ubuntu it may not be as easy, even though it counts as a Debian derivative. It is probably still easier than switching to BSD.
Mind you, this is a low-usage home server, so there isn't a lot of load on it. But Devuan is developed by and for system administrators, and they seem to be very aware of system administration issues.
I was not a gnome nor KDE user, though a lot of the associated libraries were, and still are present. (Gnome, in particular, seems to be acquiring systemd barnacles.)
-- hendriik