FreeBSD Security Survey

[Herve Boulouis]

Le 22/05/2006  11:43, Michel Talon a écrit:
> 
> OpenBSD doesn't have next to 15000 ports. In my opinion, this richness is
> one of the main assets of FreeBSD, and by necessity implies a great difficulty
> to maintain everything in a coherent and secure state. You have only to
> contemplate the years it took to release Debian Sarge to convince yourself.
> Personnally i am quite pleased with the present state of the FreeBSD ports,
> i think it is in a much better state than a couple of years before, and
> for my own use, security is a very secondary issue. People who have machines
> exposed on the internet usually have a small number of ports installed, and
> can maintain them in the latest secure version. I have around 600 ports
> installed on my 6.1 machine, which will certainly grow in time, and no
> intention whatsoever to run portupgrade on that.

I completely agree with Michel.

The question that I think is missing from the survey is the usage you do of
your freebsd installation. All production servers I have (50) use few ports
and upgrades (security related or not) are always done by hand. On the
other side, I nearly always use precompiled packages on my workstation to
save compile time and dependencies headaches.

-- 
Herve Boulouis