Work Work Work

Mon Sep 9 23:48:55 UTC 1996

> 
> Given that the end nodes have to be updated to make things better,
> it seems that the best solution is to motivate them to upgrade
> the software (it isn't exactly a difficult task) so that the
> problem of changing root addresses (and lots of others) mostly
> goes away.
> 

One thing I noticed about the beta versions of Netscape that
was quite annoying at first:  they expired.  However, they
succeeded in forcing me to upgrade my software.  

Has anyone thrown around the idea of having freeware servers expire 
(or at least give you lots of warnings/errors).   I'm not talking 
about every 3 months like Netscape, but every couple of years.

I know this sounds dangerous from a production standpoint, but
having unpatched versions of sendmail x, etc around is also
dangerous.  Nowadays, compromised security on another system often
forces one to track down denial of service attacks from that system.
You can always bandaid the problem (except 
possibly with mail or ntp'ed systems) by changing the date on the 
systems.  And you can always make available "grandfathered" versions
that run after the expire date for those people that absolutely
have to run the old version. (or let the people change their own
source code)

Better yet, make it a compile time flag and let the people that
want a nonexpiring version change it.  Most people use the default
on everything anyways (and those are the people that will never upgrade 
or patch their software).

allan
allan at bellsouth.net