Why Does Linux Have So Many Security Patches How Does One Keep Up

Noone I imagine they ignore the security fixes to the kernels. Or they may read the release notes to the security fixes and decide they do not apply to them. And they may not be foolish about this. The machines in question many not be on the Internet at all, or protected by a serious firewall, etc.

Since I must reboot my old machine to get to Windows XP, even though it runs Linux (CentOS 4.2 at the moment) most of the time, it is seldom up more than about a week. It is protected by a firewall on my main machine.

My main machine is Linux Only (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3) and it runs all the time. It gets rebooted when the power fails for longer than my UPS can manage, when I get a new kernel (was averaging about once a month, but has been less frequent lately), or if I need to monkey around inside the box (seldom).

I did have Red Hat Linux 7.3 running for about half a year once. It was protected by a firewall on this machine. It got no more updates because Red Hat had terminated support for it a while before.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 10:30:00 up 31 days, 9:54, 5 users, load average: 4.25, 4.13, 4.10