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[20161030]
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NetBSD 7.0.2 released
Why 7.0.2? Following
NetBSD's release scheme,
there are major releases (e.g. 7.0) with subsequent updates (e.g. 7.1).
Those "major" release and their updates include both new features
as well as bug fixes - the latter one again with and without security
relevance. New code, new risks - as a result for getting updates,
existing interfaces may change and lead to incompatibiltites.
This may affect either binary compatibility between programs
and their required shared libraries, as well - though rare - incompatible
chances on the source code level.
NetBSD takes quite some effort to keep such incompatibilites
low, yet they happen. The only real solutions is: no updates.
"Never change a running system" is nice for availability,
but it poses security risks. The time when a big server uptime
was considered a sign of good system administration are gone.
Today, a long update means the system (probably) runs outdated
and as such vulnerable code.
So to solve the problem a compromise is needed: little updates,
but crucial security updates do get done. Which is where
NetBSD's "minor" release like NetBSD 7.0.2 come into play.
With its set of changes, a number of external software packages
got security-related updates (e.g. OpenSSL, NTP, BIND, X),
and a smaller number of security related changes were also added,
e.g. a race condition in mail.local(8), crashes in the Networking
File System (NFS) and the native Fast File System (FFS) plus
some platform-specific crashes on MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC64.
For more information on downloading and installation see
the release announcement
as well as the platform-specific install documentation,
e.g. for NetBSD 7.0.2/arm64's INSTALL.html file.
[Tags: bind, mips, ntp, openssl, powerpc, Releases, sparc64]
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