Preferential notice of new versions

Sun Feb 4 04:44:21 UTC 2001

On Sat, Feb 03, 2001 at 07:10:23PM -0800, Sean Donelan wrote:
> On Sat, 03 February 2001, Joe Rhett wrote:
> > Just about every very large company that I've ever worked with. Also,
> > having spent numerous years working the NAVSEA and other Pentagon systems,
> > you are explicitly not permitted to install anything other than a
> > vendor-provided patch.
> 
> This may explain why Pentagon systems got hit with 250,000+ (depending on
> whose numbers you believe) intrusions last year, almost all through "known"
> vulnerabilities which had not been patched.  Perhaps the Pentagon would
> have fewer intrusions if they fixed their systems instead of waiting for
> vendor-provided $700 toilet seat patches.

>From a friend involved in cleanup, the vast majority of those system hadn't
ever had any of the vendor-supplied security patches installed. They were
'special projects' that didn't fall under the normal system operations
regulations. Such 'special projects' are now subject to review ;-)

> I suspect the reality will be those companies paying ISC for "advanced
> notice" will get some warm fuzzy feelings, and let management feel
> they've done something.  But it doesn't alter the fact the software
> had a vulnerability, and someone else could have found the hole long
> before any advanced notice is issued by ISC.  How many folks will now
> query the root-name servers CHAOS version numbers looking for a change.

Paul's comments indicate that this a software/code-related support channel,
not a security notification list. It's probably intended to cover their
costs of supporting the vendors in producing patches to their customized
versions more than anything. (I'm not involved, so this is my opinion only)

> If you are a clever programmer, I'm sure you can fix all the flaws in
> the BIND code yourself, and you never need to pay ISC a penny.

Not to be rude to Paul, but version 8's internals are a mess. I've tried 3
times to make enhancements to caching and forwarding in version 8, and I
just couldn't follow maze of interactions. Too many routines are involved
in too many places in the data. So my enhancements would work 90% of the
time, until some hereto unknown operation dumped cache coherency down the tube.

I'm a lot happier with version 9's modularized structure. That will
probably be a lot easier for most people to follow.

-- 
Joe Rhett                                         Chief Technology Officer
JRhett at ISite.Net                                      ISite Services, Inc.

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