Old version support

[Miguel Gonçalves]

Hello fellow BSDers!

I am going to install a FreeBSD 4.8 server to be used only as
a SMB server for a small network of Windows clients. I intend
to install it and leave it running without much administration
intervention (except for security bugs because we all know that
the other bugs are hard to find in FreeBSD).

Given the current End-of-Life policy for FreeBSD releases I was
wondering how can I know about security problems for unsupported
FreeBSD releases.  For example, if I install 4.8 know and if in
2 years a kernel security bug is found that affects only the 4.x
branch I suppose that a SA wouldn't be released. This could be
less far-fetched: I could be running 4.4 know and I wouldn't
know about security bugs that I should be aware of.

How is it possible to cope with this without installing a current
version?

Best regards,
Miguel Gonçalves

PS: I know this is not a good thing to do but can you please
CC to me as I am not on the list due to limitations of my
mail server. Thanks again!