Debian Addresses Security Problems 118
An anonymous reader writes "After suffering manpower shortages and other issues, Debian says it has finally addressed concerns that it was falling behind on security. Debian's elected leader Branden Robinson yesterday flagged an inquiry into the processes by which security updates are released, citing a potential lack of transparency and communication failures. It was also an appropriate time to add new members to Debian's security team, as several have been inactive for a while, Robinson said. Debian initial security problems can be found in this earlier Slashdot posting."
Re:Sarge (Score:2)
Genuine interest here as I'm about to upgrade a Debian server from Woody to Sarge this weekend. What sort of issues have you run into?
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Sarge (Score:1)
Re:Sarge (Score:3, Informative)
i ended up using apt-get upgrade to upgrade the bulk of the system then upgrading a load of stuff manually with apt-get install and then finally finishing the job with apt-get dist-upgrade
mind you red hat basically tell you too take the system offline and use th
Re:Sarge (Score:1)
Re:Sarge (Score:2)
I expected more (it's not that much friendlier/different from Woody and some packages just aren't available) and am migrating this Sarge server to CentOS 4.1 after I complete CentOS tests.
1000 developers? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:1000 developers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, Debian likely requires a lot of security people compared to other distro's, because 1) they provide very many packages (I can't say for sure more than any other, but it's likely), and 2) they don't only fix things by upgrading packages in unstable to the latest version, but also backport fixes to the version in stable.
And in the meantime, the rest of the organization needs not to be forgotten. New packages are submitted all the time, people do like to see a new release within their lifetimes, questions have to be answered, (non-security) bugs need to be fixed, etc. etc. etc. Debian is just a huge project, and I'm impressed with how well it works.
Re:1000 developers? (Score:2)
I've seen more than one distro provided security fix be put out for non-existant security issues, that were very obviously non-existant (eg, discussed on the mailing lists and proven to be non-exploitable).
Debian isn't the only group that fixed a non-existant bug (for Wine). Gentoo did it too, for Mozilla. There are probably more examples: these are ones I came across randomly without looking for them.
Re:1000 developers? (Score:5, Informative)
Due to the nature of security issues, the team had tough requirements for new members, which kept fresh blood to enter the team.
Now that this problem got the attention it unfortunatly needed, new members have stepped to the plate to strengthen the security team.
You can read more about the handling of this situation in Brandon's Project Leader Report [debian.org]
Re:1000 developers? (Score:3, Informative)
Branden is not a member of the Debian Security Team. (and his name is spelt with an 'e' not an 'o').
The current members are listed on the Debian Organizational chart [debian.org] - albeit some are less active than others.
Re:1000 developers? (Score:2)
I recalled an email [debian.org] to debian-devel about the security issue, where it was stated that only one member was left active.
Only did I recall the name incorrectly, my apologies for the confusion I may have caused.
Re:1000 developers? (Score:2, Informative)
Until recently Joey was the only active member.
In the past couple of weeks Michael Stone has become active again, which has helped.
Good. (Score:1, Funny)
Re:I wouldn't know (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:I wouldn't know (Score:1)
Thank you very much.
Re:I wouldn't know (Score:2)
Re:I wouldn't know (Score:2)
I know it's an old discussion, but I suppose you should ask yourself what you want to run it as. As a workstation, I think sarge is a great step forwar
Re:I wouldn't know (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you are running a server, especially one that is exposed to the internet or a large number of users (e.g. web server), Debian stable is really great. Especially with the ability to setup automatic updates; you can set it up, and not have to really touch it for another 2-3 years.
If on the other hand you are using it for a desktop, development, or "tinkering" machine, Debian unstable
Re:I wouldn't know (Score:4, Interesting)
You can have a very basic installation for about 100 MB. I personally think that's already a bit heavy, but it's definitely better than a lot of other distros. From there, you can get almost everything you care to mention, just by runnig apt-get install package-name. Dependencies are all taken care of automatically. You can customize how many questions you are asked during installation, from no questions to lots of options (and you can always re-run the configuration questions later).
In terms of quality, you can hardly go wrong with Debian. Everything is tested and tested again before it goes into stable (which is why there are such long times between releases), but even the packages in unstable tend to work just fine. I'd say unstable is about as up to date as Slackware-current, so if that's what you like, Debian can give it to you too.
Upgrading from one version of Debian to another is as simple as setting the right apt-repository and running apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade.
I don't know what more to say. Just try it for yourself.
(And for those who think I'm a Debian zealot: it's worse than that. I use OpenBSD at home.
Re:I wouldn't know (Score:1)
Re:I wouldn't know (Score:1)
Proof (Score:4, Funny)
PROOF that Slashdot submitters have access to previous stories!
Who knew, dupes really aren't necessary after all.
What I really want... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the hell are slashdotters [slashdot.org] trusting news about Debian from friggen zdnet? And a blog on zdnet to boot!
I mean... c'mon... it's zdnet... with about as much credibility as The Star.
Re:Can somebody tell me . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Software engineers need to put food on the table, so they have to get a real job when there isn't any corporate sponsorship. So now after you take out the time from their busy schedules to survive, there's not a whole lot left for a life and helping develope your free software.
Now instead of a stream-lined process where coders can churn out results, you're left with only a little bit of support from those people, sometimes they get burnt out and
Re:Can somebody tell me . . . (Score:1)
I've always wondered who these people were... I know that Linus was in college when he developed Linux, and that RMS actually was receiving money for sales of emacs when we first started... but who are the rest of the free software developers? Are they all academics? Corporate wageslaves like the rest of us whose company pays them to develop software and release it to the world? Are they mostly retirees? Independently wealthy? I'd love to contribute back to the OSS world, but other than a bug fix here
The easy part (Score:1)
Personally, I think any employer who demands a 70 hour workweek of programmers, but is not a programmer working 70 hour weeks him/herself ought to be taken out to the county courthouse and strung up.
Re:Can somebody tell me . . . (Score:1)
Well, it helps that most of what the rest of the world considers worthy expenditure of free time is exactly the kind of thing hackers "detest and avoid". http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/ [catb.org]
Watch the Superbowl? There's 6+ hours you could have had at least your own text editor right there. Watch TV at all? That's costing you a whole operating system per year. Carry a cell phone? I did the math once and figured out that I have added the effective 15 years to my life I lost from smok
Re:Can somebody tell me . . . (Score:2)
you are confusing free as in $0, with free as in freedom.
According to the Free Software Foundation, this includes:
* freedom to run the program
* freedom to study and modify the program
* freedom to copy the program
* freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public
so Free software is free(dom) to develop as well as use, but yes programers do have to eat.
ohh is it lunch time already?
Free Software (Score:2)
Free speech, not free beer.
Re:Free Software (Score:1)
Security Problems are good (Score:1, Funny)
Why are they trying to fix the security issues? don't they know it is bad business?
All you nipple are belong to us
Re:Security Problems are good (Score:2)
I've long said that Microsoft's greatest strength as a business is that they were the only software company who best calculated and acted on these risk/reward tradeoffs.
In all businesses there is a tradeoff between Security and other business needs including Time-to-Market and Ease-of-Use. Note that this problem isn't unique to the software industry. Credit card companies have the same challenges (ease of stealin
GOOD (Score:2)
Debian needs to react to what's happening around it, and into it. Because we NEED Debian, much more than any other distro.
If Debian happened to die, what choices would we have ? commercial distros, or distros based on commercial ones. That would suck big time. I don't even use Linux on the destop personally, I mostly use it at work on servers now. But i know i sleep better at night knowing that a thing such as Debian exis
Re:GOOD (Score:2)
Re:GOOD (Score:1)
Aside from that, it's just another Linux distro, and one that's having problems lately with security and administration behind the distro. Not good.
Re:GOOD (Score:1)
Not at all. I do run extensively Debian both on servers and desktops, and I do it because Debian is, as far as my knowledge reaches, technically-wise the best distribution over there.
Re:GOOD (Score:5, Interesting)
I could give a rat's ass about the politics of the distro.
Or the cost.
I run Debian because it is the easiest distro I've ever found when it comes time to update/upgrade.
I simply can't afford (nor can my customers) to take a machine to bare metal for an upgrade. And while most distros really try to make the upgrade from one version to the next easy... most are not "production quality" as far as I"m concerned.
If you want to deploy systems with a long service life, Debian is a fine choice.
Re:GOOD (Score:2)
Re:GOOD (Score:1)
Re:GOOD (Score:1)
It's talk like this that makes me nervous. WHAT, besides the install program and the apt-system, is so important about Debian that it and only it will do??? Did Debian suddenly do a hostile takeover of every single line of code in all of GNU, Unix, Solaris, Minix, and Linux combined? Will I still be able to read Emacs source code without Debian suing me? If anybody else uses KDE, will Debian sue them for copying the "look and feel"? Does Debian own pr
The problem with Debian (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO, that's why they have a shortage of manpower, because it's just not easy enough for people to jump in and help.
Re:The problem with Debian (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The problem with Debian (Score:2)
Re:The problem with Debian (Score:1)
No offense, but right now the last thing Debian needs is a new Developer who only wishes to look after one or two pet packages and do nothing else.
If somebody else is now maintaining the packages you mention - is anything lost? The packages are available to Debian users, and somebody else is saving you from doing work.
Stable packages are not supposed to be current, but Unstable is. Still if you know Debian sufficiently well to know about creating and maintaining packages you'd know this already, right?
Re:No offense (Score:2)
Re:The problem with Debian (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The problem with Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Debian has no such shortage of manpower. Doing a quick wc -l over the list of Debian developers gets 1,671 people. And that's just the development team, which doesn't include the list of Debian System Administrators (which, admittedly, is much shorter). Debian has enough people for what it does, and the list of contributors continues to grow.
The problem it was experiencing, however, was a shortage of people assigned to the security team, which has apparently now been resolved.
Re:Slackware -- Arch (Score:3, Funny)
Holy crap, I didn't realize Slack had become so modern! And just to think that I'm stuck with dpkg and apt, that can't resolve dependencies and automatically upgrade your box...
We need a Linux Security Information aggregator (Score:4, Interesting)
A less obvious but perhaps more frequent problem is where security problems are discovered and announced in upstream packages, but the information doesn't flow down to all the distributions. There's no formalised or automated mechanism by which distribution security teams get alerted to relevant upstream security fixes. You might get duscussion of the problem on a mailing list which is specific to the upstream package, but the Debian Security team can't be expected to subscribe to all those lists.
Similarly though, you can't rely on upstream maintainers reliably notifying 19 (or however many) distribution security contacts for each security-relevant release. In the specific case of Debian, this sort of thing is the Debian package maitainer's responsibility. However, there are thousands of Debian packages; some of the maintainers are very responsive and some are less so. Even the responsive ones go on vacation sometimes.
I'm an upstream maintainer. I'm pretty sure that for some of the distrubutions, nobody has subscribed to the mailing list where security problems would be announced (bug-whatever@gnu.org). In this particular exmaple, Debian isn't one of them - the Debian maintainer in this specific case is very active.
However, having a single point where Linux-relevant security announcements could go would be useful. BUGTRAQ simply isn't it (partly because its mailing list software is somewhat broken, also because of the noise level due to broken out-of-office response programs, and because solving this problem isn't the goal of that mailing list). That way, at least the Debian Security team - among others - could count on being notified reliably about known problems.
Of course then you still have a workload for the security team of analysing problems, deciding on responses and preparing NMUs. That may indeed require more people - I'm not claiming that an aggregated feed of upstream security concerns and fixes solves the whole problem.
Re:We need a Linux Security Information aggregator (Score:1)
Re:We need a Linux Security Information aggregator (Score:2)
Re:We need a Linux Security Information aggregator (Score:2)
RPM and Deb (Score:4, Interesting)
The baroque complexity of the debian/ subdirectory and build processes compared to an rpm
Similarly, while apt trailblazed decent dependency handling, the latest versions of yum are catching up and, extremely importantly, it is far simpler to set up a yum repository than an apt one - so third party developers can very simply set up a website with a small repository and manage it themselves.
There'd be initial massive outcry I guess, but if Debian were to just adopt rpm, life would become much simpler.
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always hated the RPM-based distros for getting more successful using an inferior technology and giving many people the impression that package management on Linux was hard, while Debian made everything easy with apt-get.
However, the times have changed. apt-get works for RPMs now, and automated package managers are finally working for RPM-based distros. Maybe the time has come for a standard in packaging land, and maybe that standard can indeed be RPM.
However, notice the many maybes. Having a standard is only helpful if every distro actually uses the same packages, and I'm not very sure that is going to happen. Without that, software still has to be packaged separately for each distribution, and there is little use for standardizing the format. In that case, the best course for Debian is to stick to their own format; if it ain't broken, don't fix it.
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:2, Informative)
A few conditionals in a single
Yes, you might still need to build different binary RPMs for the different RPM distros, but they can all
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:2)
There are also advantages just to sharing the same packaging system--sharing of bug fixes for rpm itself, ability to easily transfer rpm-building or -using skills from one distribution to another, etc.
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides, who wants their apt-get upgrade to stop every 2 minutes and ask inane questions?? Debconf sucks! Even with priority=high it acts like a stupid nieghbor that always wants to chat. RPM gets this right: install sensible defaults and let the user change stuff using a sensible interface AFTER the package is installed.
Finally, it's looking like development on apt/dpkg is largely stalled out. At least, except for package signatures, I haven't seen a user-visible change since, oh, 2000 or so.
Yum, on the other hand... COULD IT BE ANY SLOWER?? "apt-get install nmap" takes all of 4 seconds. "yum install nmap" on FC4 takes over 30 seconds as it draws endless progress bars. I have no idea why it takes so long. I like Yum's simple config files, but it's moot until they fix its speed issue.
Connectiva got it right. It's a shame rpm-over-apt hasn't caught on.
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:1)
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:2)
How is this bad? It's retaining a consistent interface for people to build other tools and scripts upon.
The one thing I'd really like to see in apt, which probably belongs more with dpkg (which apt uses) than anything else, is proper tracking of when packages are installed and removed. There have been several occasions w
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:1, Informative)
dpkg-reconfigure debconf
and select "Noninteractive". No more questions, ever.
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:2)
Actually, rpm2cpio and then just use cpio.
Re:RPM and Deb (Score:3, Interesting)
I had managed to delete all of the symlinks under
*Fortunately* the RPM database contained all of the information I needed to reconstruct the symlinks which were created by the packages.
I work with debian systems, so it occurred to me to see how I would achieve the same success on debian systems.
So far as I can tell, symlinks are not listed in any debian 'database' on the system where the package is ins
rather than zdnet fluff... (Score:1, Informative)
Xandros (Score:2)
Re:Xandros (Score:2)
They just release a version and you have to wait for the next release (and buy it) for bug fixes (and of course the release will bring new bugs since they'll add features). I don't know if they have the same policy concerning security fixes, but i wouldn't trust them at all...
Re:Xandros (Score:2)
new leadership in a good track ... (Score:1)
looks like the new leadership does some good moves
let's see how it develops...
Thanks... (Score:3, Insightful)
Security is often a thankless job. People only care once something goes wrong. They don't see all the work it takes to coordinate timely security responce. It should also be noted that Debian takes a proactive approach to security with the Debian Security Audit Team.
Debian lost a lot of its reputation with the delays for the current stable release. I think the future of Debian, if its to keep its reputation, will be to move to a standard release cycle of once every 2 years. Sure the Debian releases are few and far between compared to other distributions, but Debian is about software Freedom, not bleading edge technology. It provides a solid and secure OS, and most system administrators don't want to roll out a new version of an OS every 2 years, in fact, most would rather keep running an OS as long as there are security updates.
There are certainly a lot of challanges for Debian right now, hopefully the "Security Issue" goes away with this change.
Re:Thanks... (Score:2)
How's that possible? Debian's reputation revolves around the slow release cycle. Ask anyone about Debian and they'll likely include 'slow release on stable' as part of their comments, whether they like Debian or not.
Re:Thanks... (Score:1)
People want predictability.
Re:Thanks... (Score:1)
Re:Thanks... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sign me up for 'reliability' before 'predictability'. Not only because it's easier to spell, but for my servers that are out there, I'm not planning on that many changes.
IMHO, the stability afforded me by 'stable' is worth the occasional inconvenience of being a little behind in versions. (Or a lot behind).
Many many many people disagree with this. That is why there are other distros.
People were expecting it to come out sooner,
Why?
Who, in the Debian release process, said
Re:Thanks... (Score:2, Insightful)
I disagree. I run servers for commercial clients. A large number of these prefer to run some type of free software as a server platform these days. Debian is an attractive platform because of the care that goes into it. The slow release cycle means that time can be spent on thorough, careful software engineering. Distributions with faster release cycles are rarely as reliable as Debian over the longer term. I and my clients
More info (Score:1)
AMD64 users still waiting (Score:1)
Still waiting for the AMD64 security packages to show up a security.debian.org and not have to use the "sarge-proposed-updates" that Brandon warns against.
Debian... that name rings a bell (Score:1)
<ducks>
Re:Debian... that name rings a bell (Score:1)
Re:how about addressing users (Score:2)
Granted, Debian is not really for the Desktop weenies. But my desktop is OS X. So no problem with that.
No burn, a reply (Score:2, Informative)
These and many other distros can be seen, under the right light, as branches on a Debian trunk. I feel fairly confident in saying that no other distro could provide a sufficiently robust and broad base upon which to build.
Ubuntu and company can do as they please. Some may, eventually, cease to be recognizable as Debian-based, but that will take a very long while.
In the meantime, Debian will continue to be an example of how l
Re:Debian runs on many platforms (Score:1)
Re:Debian runs on many platforms (Score:2)