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Apple Releases Security Update 2004-01-26
ollie_ob writes "Apple's released an important security update for Mac OS X today. The update includes changes to the following important apps and services: Apache 1.3, Classic, Mail, Safari, Windows File Sharing. In addition, it includes the 2003-12-19 Security Update. It's available via Software Update." It's also available for Server.
This item's been sitting here a while, without even a FP troll. Is the Apple OS so secure that a security patch is not an immediate "get it now"?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
We're not sure what it does. But it installs fine and seems to work!
You don't have to wait for Apple, there's a packaged version, runs alongside 1.3. I tried it for a bit, but I didn't find any advantages over 1.3 for my purposes (mostly just PHP).
MacBook Pro. Worst name since the Bicycle
According to this PDF from Apple, Mac OS X Server already carries both Apache 1.3 and 2.x. If you only have OS X client, you can also download a bundled Apache 2 package from Server Logistics here, if you really want it. I tried it about a year ago, I remember it has a nice preferance pane with which you can change some settings, restart the server, and view and edit your httpd.conf (although it was a little buggy with saving the file, TextEdit had problems with the permissions)... It couldn't do anything that wasn't just as easy to do from the command line, though.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
The last security update was December 19th.
As for a monthly update... thanks, but I want new features (and especially security updates) as they become available.
Looking at my updates, which actually don't go back too far because I reloaded my laptop, the last system update i did was Dec 20th... that's over a month. The only updates I've done between then and now were application updates, like iCal. That's definitely better than being on a monthly patch release schedule for critical OS bugs.
Ever since the 10.3.2 update crashed my laptop I wait a day or two to see how things are going. That was the only crash I've ever had in Mac OS X though, and I had reloaded and (automatically) had all my settings back to the way they were before the crash, and had the system all patched up, even with the patch that crashed the system, within 35 minutes. This was amazing to me, considering all the hundreds of times I've spent reloading my own or other people's windows boxen and the frustration of importing all the previous settings (and never quite getting them ALL back). I'm not going to say OS X is the OS that does it all, but I will say that after using MS OSes since DOS 3.2 my new desktop OS of choice is OS X for reasons like that... Even so, I still do wait a day or so to patch because clearly things can, and do, go wrong some times.
I don't know weather to write this as troll, astroturfing or just ignorance. I rather update my box more frequently, if it fixes the bugs and security problems. My Fedora boxes run "yum update-check" nightly, my RedHat boxes run up2date nightly, my OS X boxes check software update daily, and I have no complaints when they find an update. I like having notices sent to my mail box, so I can check them all in one place. (you can do this with scripting the OS X command line softwareupdate).
I wish I could automate the checking for updates form Microsoft. Launching a web page and clicking through daily is no way to check for updates (and MS's security announcements are typically not sent when the updates are made available, but can be a day or two later).
MS's "monthly" policy scares me. There is more to an OS than uptime. I'd rather know my boxes are secure than know that it's been a while since I rebooted them (and I run a number Linux, OS X and Windows boxes).
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
Err, you can. I believe the feature is built-in to WinXP, and may have been available as a standard part of Win2k. However, it's also available as a separate update for any version of Windows going back at least as far as Win98.
With the Windows auto-update option installed, the system will periodically check for available updates and, depending on your settings, automatically inform you of them, download first & inform you that updates are waiting to be installed, or automatically download and install. I like the second option, if only to grab a copy of everything and show me before anything is committed, but it's up to you.
I think the auto-update runs weekly, but it should just be controlled by the system scheduler. Depending on your version of Windows, you should be able to go in and set this to run at whatever schedule you please, and if that's not good enough for you, you can probably script it with DOS, VB, Perl (ActiveState), Python (ActiveState), Bash (Cygwin), etc. Windows still lags badly behind the scripting abilities of Linux or Macintosh, but the facilities are there if you want to take advantage of them.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I haven't heard any rumors, but I'd expect it in February.
Do any of these fixes affect 10.2.8 or only for 10.3?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I have installed it on 3 machines, and everything seems to work fine with one exception. Every time I install it and reboot, there it is in the Software Update list again. I even tried installing it a 2nd time on one machine, sure enough it was there again after reboot. Big Ben, Parliament, kids
Why? Seriously, why?
OS X in this regard is no better than Windows. It's an opaque operating system and dispite the list of changes that Apple provides, there's no real way to know if the patch is going to kill your system.
Did you miss http://developer.apple.com/darwin/?
Have fun with the kernel...
Happy 20th Anniversary, Macintosh users. You get... a security fix.
Fingers crossed...been waiting for months.
Check your software update.
P.S. I dont feel like submitting it, so I'll post as AC.