security of a new installation / steps to take

[Matthew Seaman]

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Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 2008/2/20, Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk>:
>>  Make sure you track freebsd-announce at freebsd.org and apply any system patches
>>  in a timely manner.  Also make full use of portaudit(1) and generally ensure
>>  that you are running up to date versions of any ported software.
> 
> Thaaanks! Ah... this brings me to one more question. I love 6.3 but
> should I wait to install 7.0? I mean I'd hate having to update a few
> months after the server is up and running. Especially, that any
> updates will be remotely handled (fortunately the ISP promises to help
> if need be - they are excellent and very responsive in this respect).

Well, the 7.0 release candidates available now seem to run very stably
wherever I've tried them.  The make a big difference to performance,
especially if you're running highly contended, multi-threaded applications.

On the other hand, I've done a number of remote 6.x -> 7.0 upgrades
without any huge difficulty.  You run a risk of thinks screwing up if
your 7.0 kernel doesn't boot properly, for which you'ld need remote
hands to get you unstuck.  Also, you /will/ need to recompile everything
you've installed on the machine -- applications compiled under 6.x 
will run just fine so long as you don't do the 'delete-old-libs'
step of the upgrade procedure too soon, and you can install the 
compat6x libs to survive even that.  However having a lot of 6.x
software installed will make it exceeding difficult to maintain your
ports, plus the new compiler in 7.0 can get you some useful performance
enhancements.  That mega-recompilation step does tend to lead to some
non-neglible periods of service downtime, but apart from the time
consumption it's pretty routine stuff.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

- -- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
                                                  Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
                                                  Kent, CT11 9PW
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