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jonathanross Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 19 Mar 2005 Posts: 77 Location: Planet Earth
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Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 6:38 pm Post subject: How often should I upgrade the kernel ? |
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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 |
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d2_racing Bodhisattva
Joined: 25 Apr 2005 Posts: 13047 Location: Ste-Foy,Canada
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Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 10:01 pm Post subject: |
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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. |
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Weeve Retired Dev
Joined: 30 Oct 2002 Posts: 641
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Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 8:06 pm Post subject: |
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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. |
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jonathanross Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 19 Mar 2005 Posts: 77 Location: Planet Earth
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Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 10:07 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for your time, Jason.
That's really appreciated.
I'll join the announce list for a while and keep using GLSA too.
JR |
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i92guboj Bodhisattva
Joined: 30 Nov 2004 Posts: 10315 Location: Córdoba (Spain)
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Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 10:25 pm Post subject: |
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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 |
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jonathanross Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 19 Mar 2005 Posts: 77 Location: Planet Earth
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Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 10:20 am Post subject: |
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Thanks, I'll have a good look.
JR |
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