longest uptime

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Thu 28 Apr 05 19:49, Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr> 
wrote:
> Joshua Tinnin writes:
> > An long-unpatched FreeBSD install on a DMZ server makes me a bit
> > more edgy than knowing the uptime will reset to zero when it's
> > rebooted after updating.
>
> Is FreeBSD so insecure that it must be patched every few days?

Obviously not. Security update notifications are available: 
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-security-notifications

> I 
> hardly ever see FreeBSD security issues on Bugtraq, and the ones I
> see often have nothing to do with Net attacks.  A properly configured
> FreeBSD server with no local logins should be quite secure.  The only
> problem I've ever had resulted from a bug in Apache, and Apache
> obviously isn't part of FreeBSD.

It depends very much on what you're doing with it and what the 
vulnerabilities are. Security is always a balance between practicality 
and safety. FreeBSD is very secure by design, but ignoring security 
updates isn't necessarily the best idea. If I were running 3.x, it 
would probably make me a bit nervous if I couldn't update it to at 
least 4.11, though some people still do run 3.x - wouldn't necessarily 
recommend it, though.

- jt