How often should I upgrade the kernel ?

jonathanross

Hello all,

This might be a bit of a silly question but hopefully someone will be kind enough to help.

I've begun to use Gentoo on several SPARCs and I use two as redundant gateways in a production network. They run like a dream.

The only downtime we have is booting for kernel upgrades.

I've read the de facto docs which state you should upgrade immediately if there's a vulnerability announced or otherwise from time to time.

Is there a place I can reliably get mails from or view daily for when a specific kernel version on SPARC is known to have an exploit ?

How often roughly do you think I should upgrade if there aren't security problems ?

Many thanks,

JR

d2_racing · Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 10:01 pm Post subject:

I think you can do want you want when there is no threat.

But personnally, if it's for your job do theses upgrades also if there are vulnerability go for a update...not question about that.
_________________
Sysadmin of GentooQuébec.org
Wiki
Signature
IRC on Freenode : #gentoo-quebec

Weeve · Retired Dev Joined: 30 Oct 2002 Posts: 641

Ultimately if everything is working for you and there are no security issues, then I don't see a real reason to upgrade. Also, you'll need to decide for your situation (based on whatever risk policy your place of deployment may use) if a local exploit is worth upgrading for or not.

The kernel source package you are using in Gentoo may help influence your decision as well. Typically sparc-sources (although 2.4 based) is only upgraded for bug fixes or security issues. This also applies to the gentoo-sources 2.6 kernels or the vanilla-sources ebuilds, but those include fixes for all platforms as opposed to just sparc (which makes the volume of version and/or revision bumps higher).

Normally for security announcements, the gentoo-announce mailing list is a good one to subscribe to. Note however that this will have announcements for all packages that have security issues, not just kernel packages.

jonathanross · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 10:07 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your time, Jason.

That's really appreciated.

I'll join the announce list for a while and keep using GLSA too.

JR

i92guboj · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 10:25 pm Post subject:

Subscribing to the sparclinux maling list would be a nice idea too.

More info on available lists here: http://www.linux.org/docs/lists.html

jonathanross · Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 10:20 am Post subject:

Thanks, I'll have a good look.

JR :idea: