Slashdot Mirror
Savannah Back Online With Extra Security
depesz writes "As we can read here, savannah is back online. After several weeks of downtime, all security problems are resolved, and the service is again operational."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Savannah is a sort of "home base" for GNU Project developers. They can set up web sites for their projects, CVS repositories, mailing lists, post want-ads for developers, etc.
Why was it not online?
Early this month / late last month the system was compromised in some way. I'm not sure if anything was actually damaged or not, but it's best to try to keep things as secure as possible. Hence it was taken offline, reinstalled, and new security procedures have been (and are being) developed.
Why should I care?
If you're not a GNU developer, it has little immediate impact on you. It's one of those "just sharing" stories. :-)
Where's the rocketpacks?
I don't know, but I know that I don't have them.
Savannah is GNU's answer to SourceForge. Some GNU people don't like some of SF's terms for usage, so they run their own sf-style site.
It was offline because it was compromised, presumably by the brk() hole recently discovered in Linux 2.4.x. (Fixed in the latest version.)
You should care because now the authors of your favorite GNU software can be more productive. It also has serious implications to Linux 2.4 security.
I don't know anything about rocket packs.
Actually they are back "online" but reading here it seems most things won't be functional till "early January 2004".
It's quite likely that that's a vendor version (from Debian stable?) that has had all relevant bugfixes and patches backported by the vendor. I really doubt they'd use the vanilla 1.3.26.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.