FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:01.telnet

[Colin Percival]

Will Yardley wrote:
>>b) Execute the following commands as root:
>>
>># cd /usr/src
>># patch < /path/to/patch
> 
> On my home machine (5.3-RELEASE) this failed - I had to go to 
> /usr/src/contrib/telnet/telnet for the patch to apply.

Somehow the patch wasn't generated correctly for FreeBSD 5.x.  It
should be fixed soon; but what you've done works for now.

>>c) Rebuild the operating system as described in
>><URL:http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/makeworld.html>.
> 
> Just curious... why is it necessary to rebuild the whole operating
> system? Normally, the security advisories just have you rebuild the
> program in question - wouldn't that have sufficed here?

For historical reasons, the telnet build is rather messy: Depending
upon which options you have set in /etc/make.conf, telnet might need
to be rebuilt from one of four different directories.  We decided
that having everybody run "make buildworld" was far less prone to
error than trying to explain which particular version of telnet each
system would need to have rebuilt.

Colin Percival