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."
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or perhaps as a backup known good environment.
The GNU project is probably still too busy getting rid of project maintainers that do not agree to use the restrictive, some would say unfree, GFDL.
Just read my journal. It explains some of what has happened.
Debian has gradually been bringing services back online as the relevant files are verified and new passwords and keys generated. They are also tightening security in some ways, e.g. dropping pserver access to CVS servers. Alioth and www.debian.org are the latest services to be restored.
a) they firewalled ICMP echo (WTF?!?)
b) cvs pserver is not available and apparently never will be again. So I went through my checked out gcc source tree and changed all the CVS/Root files to their new scheme, but it didn't work, "directory not found".
c) I would have double checked with the webcvs, but that's also not operational.
d) The other option would have been to download a snapshot from the download area, but the download areas are also not available. OK ok, for gcc the download area is somewhere else, but for all the other projects?!
This begs the question: what _is_ back online? The web server with the note that they are back online?
So they discovered that pserver has security bugs. No, really? The solution is to provide pserver cvs in a chroot with a uid that can't write anything and maybe use systrace to disallow nasty operations.
Sorry, folks, but I don't like people who discontinue all the important features and then say it's for security reasons. That's bullshit.
I would help, but I didn't see them asking for help anywhere.