Slowing down Fedora Core [LWN.net]

Slowing down Fedora Core

Posted Jan 26, 2006 11:09 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
Parent article: Slowing down Fedora Core

I run a large university network. We frequently find compromised Red Hat Linux 7 machines, and last year we even found a RHL 4 machine.

What I'd dearly love from all distributions is for them to ship with a date after which the default route cannot be installed without explicit action which ackowledges that the distribution has no maintenance for security bugs. That action should require the use of "vi" or the jumping of some other fence that requires a level of UNIX clue.

Projects like Fedora Legacy could ship with an RPM that shifts the date.

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Turning off a distribution

Posted Jan 26, 2006 17:35 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

That sounds like a good idea.. but property changes hands a lot, and they will just blame the last sys-admin for making the change. [Having seen this before where we would turn off network ports for boxes that didnt have patches, and the port had to be manually turned back on.. or someone would move the machine to another port etc etc.]

In the end, it is an administrative action on the part of the network administrators to say what is acceptable to be placed on their networks. If they do not have that power, then they need to clearly get it in writing who does and tell them that they are the ones who are responsible for billable overtime.