It's Bash's turn to have a security hole

[jgreco]

Thank you for the explanation. Been running servers for 15 years, but as a hobbyist, not as an IT professional, so I am learning the extra precautions people in that field take.

I definitely understand the stability over bleeding edge argument, but I was always under the impression that current stable releases were sufficient for these goals, and only unstable releases needed to be avoided.

Sadly, "stable" releases are sometimes only stable in the minds of developers, and the actual experience from the trenches varies. We found FreeBSD 5 and FreeBSD 6 to be catastrof***s and basically regretted most of the machines we deployed with those "stable" releases. Most production boxes around here skipped from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD 7 when that finally came out. It isn't too hard to find examples for most other systems where people have simply avoided the "newer" because it didn't work as well. I mean, think of Windows XP vs Vista, or Win7 vs Win8.

The strategy that iX has adopted for having an intermediate stage, TrueOS, is interesting because it allows them to integrate newer meaningful changes into an older, more stable system. It is a rough road to take but may offer the best compromise between stability and not getting ridiculously far behind the bleeding edge.

 

[anodos]

Anyway, this is starting to get WAY off topic, so my apologies.

Great, now you're undermining my plans segueing into a VIM vs EMACS holy war. :)

 

[mattlach]

Sadly, "stable" releases are sometimes only stable in the minds of developers, and the actual experience from the trenches varies. We found FreeBSD 5 and FreeBSD 6 to be catastrof***s and basically regretted most of the machines we deployed with those "stable" releases. Most production boxes around here skipped from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD 7 when that finally came out. It isn't too hard to find examples for most other systems where people have simply avoided the "newer" because it didn't work as well. I mean, think of Windows XP vs Vista, or Win7 vs Win8.

The strategy that iX has adopted for having an intermediate stage, TrueOS, is interesting because it allows them to integrate newer meaningful changes into an older, more stable system. It is a rough road to take but may offer the best compromise between stability and not getting ridiculously far behind the bleeding edge.

Yeah, my concern when it comes to staying with older releases was keeping up with all the security patches. There are so many more individual pieces of software in your typical FOSS OS, than I can hope to keep up with and make sure security fixes have been backported. I usually solve this by simply going with the latest long term release, and trusting the maintainers on the long term releases to keep up with it.

That being said, corporate IT where I work still has IE8 on the default images, so I guess security isn't one of their top priorities...

Great, now you're undermining my plans segueing into a VIM vs EMACS holy war. :)

:p I use Vim. Don't have anything against Emacs, I just learned Vim first, and don't want to spend the time and energy learning another.

 

[cyberjock]

Just an FYI... 9.2.1.8 is available at download.freenas.org. Expect an announcement shortly. ;)