Excitement
A few days ago there was this Slashdot article about a serious Linux kernel security hole. Since I was running a version of Linux that had the issue, I thought I had better patch it on my server ASAP.
My machine basically has nobody on it, so I am really not worried about somebody using the exploit directly. But, I do have a number of network services, like my mailserver, webserver, SSH server - and if any of those has a vulnerability, I sure don’t want somebody using that to get root access on my box!
So, last night I manually patched my kernel source, rebuilt my kernel, and rebooted the machine. It was exciting and nerve-wracking; since it’s been so long since I built a kernel myself (2000? 2001? It was at DALi I am sure…), I didn’t know if I would get it right! Then there’s the fact that I am running RAID1 on my boot partition, and I wasn’t sure how the kernel update would go with that.
But, everything went fine. The machine rebooted fine, and when I tried the exploit on the patched system, nothing bad happened. All my services started back up without a hitch.
It was kind of exciting!