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epcoa 8 hours ago

Anyone relying on a 30+ year old monolith kernel written in C to not have some exploitable LPEs lurking should stay in basket weaving and out of sysadmin.

itsthefrank 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure why the snark but if people are running FreeBSD then they should be...basket weaving instead of using it? Yes, the correct solution is to patch and reboot but not everyone is in a place to jump and do that which is why a temp workaround, if possible, would be welcome

wswin 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I think good system should be prepared to do a reboot in a short notice. Even some long running jobs can have a pause mechanism.

cyberpunk 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep.

You should treat any system where non-admins regularly login as basically insecure/owned and rig your architecture appropriately.

TBH -- I don't have any of these kinds of boxes anymore. Who is really running anything like this in 2026 and for what purpose?

mrln 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not necessarily FreeBSD, but for Linux this applies to most universities with a CS program, I think.

The systems should be cut off from sensitive administrative data, but a malicious student would at the very least have access to the other students' data with an LPE.

jmspring 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stability of ecosystem. No systemd. Native ZFS. Jails over Docker. Been using it for 20+ years and it’s my preferred server OS.

cyberpunk 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, I mean do you run FreeBSD boxes where users who should not ever assume root access actually login to do tasks?

My point is that if you do, you probably shouldn't run, for e.g applications which need production db credential, or hold sensitive data on these boxes, or .. whatever.

Edit: I use FreeBSD extensively, for various things -- but shell access to them is restricted to the sysadmins..

tick_tock_tick an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Free root for anyone for over 20 years too.

icedchai 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same. I've been using it since 1996. Initially, we used it at an early ISP for DNS, SMTP, and POP3 for roughly 8K users, and it stuck with me.

bch 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>> monolith kernel written in C

> Who is really running anything like this in 2026 and for what purpose?

Am I parsing your question correctly?

cyberpunk 7 hours ago | parent [-]

No, I worded it badly. See below.

yjftsjthsd-h 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

...as opposed to what, exactly? Linux is a 34 y.o. monolithic kernel in C, the BSDs are all forked from the same base (386BSD) of around the same age, XNU is 29 years old (and also heavily based on BSD code while also throwing in mach code) in C and other languages,...

raddan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The 33 year old Windows NT kernel, duh.