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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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On yet another slashdot posting with absolutely zero informative content (except possibly to people who already knew what the article meant).
not anymore. is been slashdoted. :-)
What is Savahna?
Why was it not online?
Why should I care?
Where's the rocketpacks? We were promised rocketpacks...
You can't take the sky from me...
And yet they still use Apache 1.3.26? Which by now is known to have some nice exploits and other faults ... no disrespect to apache here though, it's still far superior to that IIS crap.
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
Awesome.
Although, I wish Savannah had some sort of system where I could do installation of software similar in the way that FreeBSD does: the ports collection.
There are a lot of cool program there that I use daily, and I would like to have them all upgraded and manageable through a simple collection of applications (like the package managers for the ports collection.)
Either way, manager or no manager, there are some applications that I wanted to go get so Ill go do that now.
Thanks GNU we love YOU.
Savannah wasn't hacked, it was GNU/0wn3d.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
or perhaps as a backup known good environment.
all security problems are resolved
I rather doubt that. Perhaps all security problems of which the server administrators are aware have been resolved, but there are definitely going to be other security problems left.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
It took them weeks to realise that they'd been owned and months to fix anything. I think they need a few lessons from the Gentoo people...
1. What is Savannah?
2. What was the security problems?
3. Why should I or Developers care about this?
4. Why was it down for several weeks?
Not something that can be answered with moving a mouse around and 1/2 a second.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Does anybody know why they didn't implement something like LIDS?
War is necrophilia.
Nothing like welcoming them back online with a good ol' slashdotting!
... of packages.debian.org
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.
So, was I the only person who read the headline, *and* the blurb, and immediately thought of something completely different?
Java: the bastard demon spawn of C++ and Ada
What exactly is wrong with the packages server now? What are they doing to fix it, for so long? ETA? Why don't they put some info on the (disabled) homepage? Not exactly a system that my old Wall Street clients would rather move to, from Solaris.
--
make install -not war
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.
grsecurity is a promising mechanism to un-root a linux kernel based system: ipaddr, user or group based roles open or deny access to privileged operations without ever having uid=0 to begin with. It's a bit complicated to use but the system can auto-learn and generate these policies. Also, the system includes PaX which does some neat things like scramble the stack to thwart buffer overflows, non executable pages, etc... I've played with both (well, Mandrake secure kernels have grsec compiled in, not shure about pax) and although I still can't figure out (read: "ready made & nicely packaged ;-)") all of it but it does give the warm & fuzzy feeling it makes a difference...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
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.