On 10/11/2010 9:17 AM, John Doe wrote:

From: Giles Coocheygiles@coochey.net

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On Mon, October 11, 2010 13:36, Ritika Garg wrote:

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I can't understand exactly what these security updates do? Why is there a need to have a security update?

What is your IP? :-D

Keep this information secret, but I think his IP is 127.0.0.1 ... And there's no firewall!!! ;P

JD

Too funny JD!

But, not to mention that for most Linux distros, source is available, so finding bugs in theory is easier. This leads to the theory that the code has been more deeply tested (snooped) and repaired leading to a most robust end product.

Secure? Yes, as long as you apply the updates as needed. You can always read about why there is a patch and decide if it is applicable to your situation.

John Hinton

Keith Keller wrote on 10/12/2010 06:35 PM:

Somewhat related to this, does anybody know (or have links to) what work, if any, is happening with the yum security plugin? The only information I could find was some posts from Karanbir from last year, basically saying it was a low priority because it'd be a lot of work. (I'd be willing to help if I knew more about what help was needed.)

Getting pretty far OT on an already rambling thread, but if you really want to help then centos-devel is the proper place to volunteer.

Phil

On 11/10/10 11:30 PM, sync wrote:

I have the same problem on it . Isn't the CentOS very safe?

*Sigh*

If you don't update it then it won't remain so. It's like buying a brand new deadlock for the door to your house and then leaving the door wide open when you go out. Chances are that sooner or later your stuff will get stolen and the place will get trashed.

Regards, Ben

At Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:30:04 +0800 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:

I have the same problem on it . Isn't the CentOS very safe?

If you apply ALL of the security updates as they become available. ALL O/Ss have security updates from time-to-time (what do you think those MS-Windows 'Service Packs' are?).

In the case of CentOS (and Linux in general), the security updates are generally released *before* some cracker writes an exploit, where as with MS-Windows the updates show up like 6 months *after* some cracker has trashed a zillion PCs and recuited them into an army of zombies and incorporated them into a botnet.

The reason for the more timely updates with Linux is that it is open source, and "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (I am not totally sure if this is a quote from Eric Raymond or Linus Torvalds). There are *lots and lots* of people looking over the code looking for mistakes (bugs). There are *always* bugs in any non-trivial piece of software -- no non-trivial piece of software is perfectly bug free. Us programmers *try* to write the best code we can, but sometimes stuff slips through the cracks... The operating system itself (the kernel) is a very complex piece of code. Plus there are all of the additional bits and pieces that people use for everyday tasks, many of these pieces of software are fairly complex all on their own.

Also, since Linux is not a monolithic blob (like MS-Windows), much of the everyday software is maintained by a whole batch of different people and each piece of software has a different schedule of update releases, so there are updates (security and otherwise) released at different times. Red Hat / the CentOS team release these updates as soon as they become available (and have been quality tested, etc.).

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