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FreeBSD 12.4

by SpaceInvader on 12/6/22, 8:31 AM with 23 comments

• by YPPH on 12/6/22, 1:28 PM

  Something I've really come to appreciate with OpenBSD is the stability and ease of in-place upgrades. I'm not very familiar with FreeBSD, but from what I've read it seems it too has stable, straightforward, in-place version upgrades. I'd love to hear people's experiences.

  I've found with Linux distributions that aren't rolling releases, things tend to break in annoying and insidious ways, such that you generally need to, or at least it is strongly advisable to, fresh install each time.

  This is probably of less importance given the demise of the monolithic server, but for my own server, I really appreciate it and the avoidance of reconfiguring everything.

• by markstos on 12/6/22, 3:40 PM

  Telnetd is deprecated here.

  When I started hosting professional web hosting in 1997, telnet was the standard way to log into servers. FreeBSD, which we used, didn't integrate SSH into the base system until 2000. In practice, no credentials were known to be compromised by sending them in plaintext. I recall a pretty rapid industry switch from telnet to SSH when it became available outside of OpenBSD.

• by gjadi on 12/6/22, 9:09 AM

  Congrats to the team.

  I looked briefly at the relnotes[1], there is some scary stuff, such as this vulnerability in ping(1): https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-22:15...

  Since a lot of code is shared between BSDs, I wonder if others have the same vulnerabilities.

  1: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.4R/relnotes/

• by eska on 12/6/22, 9:31 AM

  On one hand it’s great FreeBSD uses capability sandboxing, on the other I’m sick of memory errors since the day before yesterday.