[mythtv-users] Hmmmm

Travis Tabbal travis at tabbal.net
Fri Jul 2 16:59:18 UTC 2010


On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Jason Ward <jasonfward at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK, thanks everyone, yes, I want MythTV to behave like an appliance.
>
> The idea of not updating just seems to contary to what I've learned about
> security in recent years, and even contrary to what Ubuntu say themselves
> about updates.  Plus I assure you, I've read here more than once, and been
> told directly more than once on this mailing list, that if I have a
problem
> I really need to make sure I'm running the latest release.
>
> But if upgrading the latest release is going to cause me problems, but not
> running updates means my system is less secure and won't have any existing
> issues cleared, I feel like I'm caught between a rock and a hard place.
>
> Oh well, not anyones fault, just a compromise that I must choose, whilst
not
> actually really understanding my choice.  But for me, MythTV needs to work
> as an appliance, so I guess infrequent, say twice annually updates to
> coincide with new releases of Ubuntu is what I need to do.

There's always a tradeoff. :) Your Myth boxes shouldn't be exposed directly
to the internet, so security is less of a concern. It still matters, but
keep an eye on what they are updating and why they are doing it. If the fix
is for SSL, but you aren't exposing SSL to the internet, the fix is less of
a concern for you. Not that there aren't internal threats as well, but they
are less likely. Personally, I expose only SSH and OpenVPN to the internet,
so those are the packages I watch closely for OS level updates. Myth I just
update when I feel the need to update everything else or there is a problem
I suspect might be corrected in -fixes.

It would be nice if there were a more stability based update branch
available, only critical fixes or something like that. Even then, you might
still run into problems. I'm using Ubuntu as well, still 9.10, but I'll
likely be updating to the LTS release here soon. Then likely stay there for
a while unless I see a reason to update. LTS is nice as Ubuntu guarantees
security fixes for the long term. With media related stuff you can't always
stay there as long as you might like though, just because you need newer
libs or similar.
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