Old version support

[Bill Moran]

Miguel Gonçalves wrote:
> 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?

Sooner or later you're going to have to upgrade ... eventually things
aren't supported anymore.

If you subscribe to security-advisories at freebsd.org you'll get
notifications of problems as they are found.  The emails list the
versions that have been patched, so you'll know when support stops.

This page has a lot of information on policies:
http://www.freebsd.org/security/index.html

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com