[mahmud]

Securing this beast should serve as a nice training course for any sysadmin; bonus points if you start handing out shell accounts to anonymous people in certain neighborhoods of EFNet.

[pavs]

Just update packages to the latest, patched version. What so difficult about it?

[mahmud]

If this is based on a popular distro, maybe; but if you wanted to loosen up a Linux box, you can build a freak from pieces that no one would find lineage for, much less a repo.

[pavs]

umm no.

He specifically mentions that all the softwares are vulnerable:

"Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks."

Just replace them with the latest, patched, default configured version.

[btilly]

What pieces of software do you replace? How do you replace it? Remember that it likely doesn't some with anything like apt to make this easy.

[kaens]

You wipe the disk and install OpenBSD.

[mahmud]

Good idea, but completely beside the point.

[zachrose]

Or you could just get an iPad.

[milkshakes]

There are other ways to update software..

[mahmud]

Riiight, downloading individual packages, libraries and kernels and building them from source. Which is why I thought it would be a good exercise, however very boring.

Running a Bastille script on the box would give you a quick TODO list. Pushing it to "production" and getting a few servers up and running, across version incompatibilities, would prove a bit more interesting. Running it under an older 2.4.x or 2.2.x kernel, doubly so.

[joe_the_user]

I'm far from a security expert.

I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours upgrading random packages in Linux for various reasons. Afterwards, I didn't feel any wiser in security or anything except how to build stuff (well, maybe a bit of systems stuff...).

If upgrading is main task here, what do you really learn? If upgrading isn't the main task here, what is?

[ciupicri]

Not update, but upgrade to another more secure distribution.

[nphase]

Or 4chan.