Re: [gentoo-security] Idea for easily checking for security updates.

[Ixion]

I second that! I've been doing 'emerge -u world's on my web server at home
and the fileservers here at work, and like Mark, do not feel comfortable
with this. I also don't have a lot of time to dig around and find out why
there was an update (unless there's an easy way to do this??).

I think 'emerge -u -L1 world' is an awesome idea! :)

> On 9-Feb-04, at 7:11 AM, Calum wrote:
>
>> What I think would be a good idea is the creation and maintenance of
>> say 4 new
>> virtual packages:
>> remote-root
>> remote-shell
>> local-root
>> remote-dos
>> (Maybe there could be more, but these are the ones that I can think
>> of).
>
> Couple of comments.
>
> This doesn't make sense to me personally, emerge remote-root sounds
> more like something you would do to obtain remote root of a machine
> than to repair a potential one (just terminology stuff there is my
> complaint).  In theory the idea seems valid, in practice I'm not sure
> this would be the best approach.
>
> What I would rather see in portage is a way to rank updates (10 for
> trivial, 5 for major version upgrades with more features, etc, and 1
> for security needs).  Then something like emerge -up -L1 world might
> only show any major security updates you need to do along with the
> required deps (but hopefully not optional ones).  This should be fairly
> achievable with minor changes to the low levels (to add metadata for
> the update's urgency), and maybe 10-15 lines in the portage code base.
>
> Second comment.. the 'virtuals' you compare the 'remote-root' pkg vs.
> system pkg with work radically differently than what might be the
> initial assumption.  In fact world and system are both very different
> than the typical metapkgs (like kde, gnome, etc).  They are both hard
> coded into the setup so to speak.  System being defined in the profile
> (pkgs marked with * in packages file are system files), and world is
> maintained similarly (yet differently) in your portage db directory in
> a flat file (it keeps running tabs on what's installed, etc).
>
> I for one would much rather see a severity level of some sort happen in
> portage, for those of us that are afraid to emerge -u world to fix
> these sorts of vulnerabilities (as you never know what you are getting
> into with that if you run a very locked down server), which would also
> give us a very quick way of assessing what if any updates are needed
> for security reasons without having to do a lot of digging my hand or
> comparing versions vs. all kinds of GLSA announcements, etc.
>
> On that note it would be even better if at the end of emerge sync it
> could give you a message telling you that there are some level 1
> security updates available and how to view the list of them, similarly
> to how it tells you that there are portage updates available.
>
> Mark
>
>
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