Re: Keeping any up-to-date?

[peter () TIOKI COM AU (Peter May)]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bugtraq List [mailto:BUGTRAQ () netspace org]On Behalf Of
> Randolf-Heiko Skerka
> Sent: Thursday, 14 January 1999 17:58
> To: BUGTRAQ () netspace org
> Subject: Keeping any up-to-date?
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 11, 1999 at 09:46:02AM +0000, John RIddoch wrote:
> > To carry on the thread of keeping Solaris patched, I wrote a script to
> > automatically update a systems patches overnight via cron.
>
> Great work. But are things like that available for other OSes
> (I´m thinking
> of AIX, HP-UX, CISCO IOS[?] and so on)?
>
>   Randolf Skerka

I'm not sure if I would use this type of operation in a production
environment.

How often do we see a vendor supplied update/patch/PTF which:

   a) is insufficient,
   b) is in error,
   c) makes the situation worse, or
   d) disables nearly everything to fix a minor problem.

at least on the first release of the patch!

Most critical security patches are carefully thought out by the vendor to
handle most of the people most of the time. As a responsible (!)
administrator of many systems I'm pretty sure I want to read all the doc,
and ascertain the impact of each particular update/patch/PTF etc. before
I apply it to the production box, and probably talk to the customer
about it too ... oh, and maybe send each of them an invoice as well :~)

That being said, I do have a FreeBSD box here as a `victim' which is
updated by SUP every night from the source tree - and it gets broken
every once in a while.

Oh, and if you want to auto-apply PTF's in the IBM/AIX world, you will be
applying up to 10-15 each day. You will need over 14 GB of storage for the
entire PTF tree (look at ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/aix/fixes/v4 )
just for the V4 branch, assuming you are going to mirror them, not
somehow intelligently apply them. And a lot of them are tagged as
"PE: PTF in error" - but you still have to put it on first before the one
that really fixes the problem....

Automation ? Maybe not for me ...

> --
> +------------------------------------------------------------------------+
> | Randolf Skerka                              debis IT Security Services |
> | Tel. +49-228-9841-510                                   Rabinstrasse 8 |
> | Fax. +49-228-9841-60                                        53111 Bonn |
> +------------------------------------------------------------------------+

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