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Posts tagged with: solaris

Matching CVE Numbers to Solaris Patches

July this year saw Solaris starting to comply with Oracle's standard practice of releasing quarterly Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) containing security fixes. Unfortunately, it also saw Solaris complying with Oracle's policy to not actually provide a correlation between CVE numbers and the corresponding patches in the CPU itself (CPU July 2010). This naturally caused a lot of uproar in the Solaris install base with a lot of big customers very upset.  Continue reading ►

Ping(1M) on OpenSolaris Easter Egg

It's amazing what you discover whilst working a weekend shift with a bit of time to spare. Whilst perusing through the shell scripts used as part of the Sun in-house built VPN solution (Oracle are giving it the chop in favour of Cisco SSL AnyConnect client which doesn't officially work on Solaris x86 - it does with the help of openconnect though ;-) ), I discovered a little easter egg in ping(1M).  Continue reading ►

Auditing and OpenSSH On Solaris

Many people don't run the SSH that comes with Solaris 9 and later on their Solaris hosts, instead opting for OpenSSH or one of Tectia's SSH products. Some don't like SunSSH's versioning, as it makes it hard to determine if SunSSH is vulnerable to the same issues as OpenSSH (most often it's not or the issue has already been addressed), others rely on features on OpenSSH that haven't made it into SunSSH (there aren't many) and then there are those who's corporate guidelines only allow for a third party solution - probably for uniformity across platforms. Whatever the reason, all of these people are security conscious so they may also have an auditing (aka BSM) requirement too, and this is where the problem comes to light: they soon discover that it appears that not all events are being recorded for users who connect via this third party SSH software.Thankfully it's easy to get OpenSSH working with Solaris auditing thanks to the very generous code contributions made by Sun to the OpenSSH community, way back in 2001, that were finally included in OpenSSH 4.0 and later. However, despite these contributions, people still miss the details on getting BSM working as they expect and this is what I'll address here.  Continue reading ►

Automatic Updates for Thunderbird and Firefox on Solaris and OpenSolaris

As with Linux, Firefox and Thunderbird are available for Solaris and OpenSolaris in a variety of forms: supplied with the OS, installed separately from a pkg and installed separately from a tarball (both available from Mozilla.org). Of these, the only way you can get any sort of automatic update is with the first option: via an OS update and this tends to lag behind the available releases by quite some margin. Well, that's about to change, at least for some people.I'll get straight into the technical details and leave the background behind all of this to the very end.This post and the accompanying code was inspired by this article on Mozilla Developer Center.Update: Ooops, it would seem the automatic update DOES work by default for the tarball downloads, it just doesn't offer an automatic upgrade between 3.5.x and 3.6.x as I was testing. I'll leave the rest of this post as is as an "education" for those wanting to implement their own internal crude update system.  Continue reading ►
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