[PLUG] Re: Got hacked last night - HELP!

[Paul Johnson]

<#secure method=pgp mode=sign>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> writes:

> On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, John Meissen wrote:
>
>> I can't really fault Mandrake. When you're giving away most of your
>> product for free it's difficult to support the resources needed to
>> maintain a lot of legacy versions.
>
> This brings up a very good point. The upgrade path for distributions must
> be as painless as possible so folks have no excuse to not keep
> current.

One of the things that sold me on Debian, right there.  All it takes
to upgrade if you have a connection to the outside world or (if you're
insane or otherwise stuck) from the latest CD set:

# apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

Give it some time to get the updates, and it'll set up the packages
for you (depending on your debconf settings, if you don't have it set
to noninteractive, it'll ask you some questions about how you want the
defaults set).

If you have cron-apt installed, it gets easier: You've already done
the apt-get update *and* already downloaded the packages as of the
last time cron.daily ran and you only have to do the apt-get
dist-upgrade part.

> I remember there were some problems moving from Red Hat 5.x to 6.x
> but it wasn't too bad. Going from 6.x to 7.x generated weeks of
> traffic on this mail list as folks had all sorts of pain. When I
> finally made the move, sure enough, I tripped over a number of
> issues. I recall that there were similar pains going to 8.x and 9.x;
> perhaps to the FC series, too.

Debian actually does some usability testing on their packages *before*
they go stable.  So if you're running Debian Stable, you can rest
assured that things will upgrade smoothly.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFBY3GBUzgNqloQMwcRApTjAJ0X14tKDjKoWr/zxz8lrcATbY0y+wCfYNGo
PvIG0Vnzmx0XnZuaUraieM8=
=OvK2
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----