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Re: [Sheflug] SECURITY -- Kernel vunerability



And Lo! The Great Prophet adwilson [at] talk21.com uttered these words of wisdom:
> 
> Chris,
>   Thanks for the heads up... now for the inevitable daft question :) ...
> 
> I know I should know this, but I'll ask anyway.  I'm running  Debian (finally
>  made the leap to SID, which I now love) presumably instead of patching my ke
> rnel I can simply do an apt-get update and I'll get whatever security patch d
> ebian release to fix the problem ?  or does apt-get not do kernel patches ?  
> Secondly is there some simple check I can do to see if I have the correct ker
> nel or not ?  or some website I could check ?  I had a look on www.debian.org
>  through the news section, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for.

I don't know how Debian issues patches like that -- one of the deb bods may 
know more about it (anyone?). As for which kernels, there was a debate on 
linux-kernel (after I did some digging) about whether 2.2 was affected at 
all, with no certain outcome. For the 2.4 series, anything before 2.4.24 is 
affected; Marcelo released 2.4.24 to fix this issue. 2.6.0 is also 
affected. It's unclear whether a patch to fix it is going to be in 2.6.1 
atm, but there is discussion about it, so a good chance.

To find your kernel version, drop to a shell prompt (console/xterm/kterm/
gterm/or whatever) and issue:

	uname -r

It should come back and tell you the kernel version you're running.

As for Redhat/SuSE and the like, as they end up adding extra patches to 
their kernels, I don't know what state they're in.

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson                 \ NP: Annie Lennox - 10. Something So Right
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk          \  
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  \ 
   \ http://redclaw.org.uk/        ~---------------------------------------



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