People love to point out when someone is making mistakes, so I’m going to end this Friday with some great news for Ubuntu Server sysadmins about someone who’s been silently doing the right thing. While some people are scrambling on a Friday to square away their servers, Ubuntu Server users are sitting in a good spot thanks to the work of Scott Kitterman, who has already taken care of this on all supported versions of Ubuntu.
I asked Jamie Strandboge (from the Security team) on the amount of work this takes. Here’s what he told me:
a) Clamav is obviously a virus scanner. It needs to be kept up to date. b) Clamav upstream often does API/ABI bumps to handle new types of malware. c) Ubuntu likes to stick with an old version and patch.
Options ‘b’ and ‘c’ are at odds with each other and can’t be done. Scott does major version upgrades for clamav while testing all the rdepends so they don’t break. He uploads them to -backports first where it is tested; when they are in good shape he basically tells me “Go!”. I then spend about a day rebuilding/testing everything in -security and upload the fixes. He created all the documents, the actual packaging work, and went to the tech board for the SRU exception and walked it through the process. He does this for Ubuntu development AND stable releases.
For more information on how it all works, check out the wiki pages:
Don’t forget to give ScottK a hug when you see him on IRC.
EDIT: ScottK mentions that Imre Gergely did the bulk of the testing, so if you see him on IRC (nick:cemc), go ahead and give him a hug too!