Is it safe to run a webserver on 5.x ?

[Alex de Kruijff]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 01:56:27AM -0400, bsdfsse wrote:
> 
> I started running FreeBSD because a friend of mine is going to run a 
> website on 4.10-STABLE.  Someone had told him that 4.x was "safer" to 
> run than 5.x.
>
> Recently I had a hardware problems on one of my machines that is forcing 
> me to run 5.x on it, instead of 4.x.  Should I lobby my friend to also 
> run 5.x ?  His webserver will be behind a hardware firewall.

I would let him leaf his server on 4.x and wait untill 5.3 or untill
there are no more 4 releases plus fixes. But would go with 5.2.1 if I
had to do a fresh install. And would do a fresh install if I switched to
5 because of UFS2.

> Its my understanding servers on the web often run the "security 
> release", which is RELEASE+fixes.  That way, no new features in STABLE 
> introduce more exploitable bugs.  Other people run web servers on STABLE 
> (they must feel confident that nothing new is going to break).

This is true for every release stable or not. I run 5.2 plus fixes.

-- 
Alex

Articles based on solutions that I use:
http://www.kruijff.org/alex/FreeBSD/