Hello

I've several servers running with Slackware, tried different distro's
but always went back to Slack, now I stay.
Mostly I recompile kernels (for RAID-drivers for instance) using the
latest stable kernel version. Applications like Apache/PHP/MySQL are
compiled from source too.
My question is now, how do I keep these systems up to date? Is it really
necessary to always use the latest kernel, and the latest version of
applications?
What should I do with standard software installed with Slackware, like
gcc, shells, ssl, ssh, ...? I'm using a few Slack 9.0/9.1, are they at
risk now? What can I do to update them?

Regards

Peter

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IIRC somebody asked a similiar question a week ago, although I think it
was more about the STATE of security updates for older distros, it is
definately relevant...

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Peter Fastré a écrit :
> Hello
>
> I've several servers running with Slackware, tried different distro's
> but always went back to Slack, now I stay.
> Mostly I recompile kernels (for RAID-drivers for instance) using the
> latest stable kernel version. Applications like Apache/PHP/MySQL are
> compiled from source too.
> My question is now, how do I keep these systems up to date? Is it really
> necessary to always use the latest kernel, and the latest version of
> applications?
> What should I do with standard software installed with Slackware, like
> gcc, shells, ssl, ssh, ...? I'm using a few Slack 9.0/9.1, are they at
> risk now? What can I do to update them?
>
> Regards
>
> Peter

You don't need no more to update Slackware since 10.0 /o\

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:10:31 +0000, Peter Fastré wrote:

> Hello
>
> I've several servers running with Slackware, tried different distro's
> but always went back to Slack, now I stay.
> Mostly I recompile kernels (for RAID-drivers for instance) using the
> latest stable kernel version. Applications like Apache/PHP/MySQL are
> compiled from source too.
> My question is now, how do I keep these systems up to date? Is it really
> necessary to always use the latest kernel, and the latest version of
> applications?

If it isn't broken, don't fix it. But you *must* keep an eye on the
ChangeLog files for the version(s) you are using, and apply any security
fixes. Otherwise your server will get hacked. I don't know how old a
version of Slackware has to be before Pat stops issuing security fixes.
When he does, it's time to upgrade.

> What should I do with standard software installed with Slackware, like
> gcc, shells, ssl, ssh, ...? I'm using a few Slack 9.0/9.1, are they at
> risk now? What can I do to update them?

I use slackpkg to keep my machine up-to-date. Just run
slackpkg update
to get the latest list of packages, then
slackpkg upgrade package-name
to upgrade a package to the latest version. I made a little shell script
that just does the upgrade for each package that I've got installed.

John

Peter Fastré wrote:
> My question is now, how do I keep these systems up to date? Is it really
> necessary to always use the latest kernel, and the latest version of
> applications?

This is completely a personal preference. I like to stay up to date for
security reasons, and simply because I find if I don't stay up to date,
then along comes a new version with a feature that "I can't live
without", and suddenly I'm trying to upgrade six or seven versions at
once. That is almost always a lot more pain than keeping the versions
up to date as they change.

> What should I do with standard software installed with Slackware, like
> gcc, shells, ssl, ssh, ...? I'm using a few Slack 9.0/9.1, are they at
> risk now? What can I do to update them?

If you want my opinion, I'd suggest upgrading the whole systme to 10.1.
I have a machine that I've used swaret to upgrade all the way from 9.0
to 10.1. Every time I go to update a full version, I've braced for pain
but never felt it.

I know people swear by (or at) swaret, slapt-get, and other package
updaters. Pick one that you like and run with it. The only real gotcha
for me was packages that change name between one Slack version and
another. For the most part, these are kept to a minimum though.

I've gone the other way, too. I had a firewall machine that had
Slackware 8.0 on it and never upgraded it until 10.1 came out. As 8.0
predated the modern Slackware package naming system, this was beyond the
upgrade capability of swaret, so I redid the whole system. Best thing
you can do if you do this is burn a DVD with a copy of the full
filesystem of the old version. This makes bringing over configuration
files a lot easier - and those config files, cron jobs, all the custom
stuff, that's what takes all the time when upgrading.

Kurt.

Thx for all your responses!