On Fri, 2 Jun 2000, T@W wrote:

> What's happening with NetBSD lately? I saw 5 security advisories on NetBSD
> within a week. What's fundamentally causing that?

The fact that our security folks have gotten around to doing security
advisories. :-)

If you look close at the security advisories, you'll see one of them
actually was in response to a FreeBSD advisory describing how a rogue
process could block all processes from exiting. In 1994, NetBSD changed
one of the System V subsystems in a way that limited the impact of the
security advisory. Under NetBSD, only processes using a particular System
V feature (semaphores I think) would be blocked. Since very few programs
use them, very few programs can get so attacked.

A lot of security advisories isn't necessarily a bad thing. If they are
all comming with fixes, then it means the OS is staying on top of things
and correcting problems.

> To be honest the more recent the version, the more disruptions crop up:
> NetBSD's stability crumbling with every newer version and things which were
> ok in 1.3.* crept in again (e.g.CAPS LOCK) and never get fixed.
> Should we switch?

Well, that's for you to decide. I'm certainly not switching. :-)

1.4.2 did have problems. But 1.4.3 is probably going to happen, and 1.5
will be starting soon. If you're running into problems, report them. If
you can, fix them. :-) We have the source for the OS, so we have a lot
more flexability. We can fix problems as soon as they are found - jsut
recompile with a patch. :-)

Take care,

Bill