On Saturday 25 June 2005 15:24, Rony Bill wrote:

Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:

...

hows this: http://www.indiainfoline.com/news/news.asp?dat=61173

This may be a dumb question :) but why does linux need to be patched??? We select a distro based on its success reports and it is anyway configured to be secure.

It should not be a problem for free distros to add automatic updaters in their software to update just like microsoft's updates.

Every piece of software suffers from some vulnerability or bug. These may allow the system to be ow3nd by some cracker or reduce the performance of the system. Hence systems need to be patched. Apart from the above improvements in the software also necessitate patches / upgrades. The cost of patching is not the price of the patch but the system downtime and manpower costs. Most distros do have autoupdates. In any case it is easy to setup a cron job to do updates. But in large systems you dont want to do auto anything because large number of other mission critical appps are running and patching one part may cause problems in another. M$ takes the cake for this. So you download the patch check what the heck it is patching in the first place. Decide if it is worthy enough before shoving it up your system.

rgds jtd