Grumble grumble upgrades

Dec 16, 2007 13:54

Jon upgraded my laptop for security reasons. I tend to like to keep things as they are until something is broken. I'm behind his firewall, what could go wrong? right ( Read more... )

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jon_leonard December 18 2007, 03:45:33 UTC
I'm behind his firewall, what could go wrong? right?

Certain programs (like, for example, web browsers with unpatched vulnerabilities) may still be risky even behind a firewall. Especially the outgoing-connections-only style we run. I can tighten up the firewall so it's safe, but you probably wouldn't like the result.

Part of the problem in this case is that Adobe's installer is broken (on our setup, at least); I hand-edited it to make it work.

Further investigation indicates that something you did to your local firefox is confusing things: Firefox on your system plays YouTube videos (albeit without sound) for me, and your install does not. We'll investigate that more later. The sound is probably due to the lack of a post-upgrade reboot. (Your running kernel is old enough that it doesn't have the current interfaces.)

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apt-cache, aptitude anonymous December 24 2007, 04:36:59 UTC
Normally in a situation like that I would "apt-cache search flash | less" to get a list of packages that have "flash" in the description (possibly adding the -n switch to apt-cache, to narrow it down to just the packages with "flash" in their name), then "aptitude install flashplayer-mozilla". (Aptitude automatically installs any dependencies ( ... )

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Re: apt-cache, aptitude jon_leonard December 27 2007, 05:39:43 UTC
Yes, this was sarge-to-etch. The excuse was that it was the last machine in the house for the upgrade, and there was finally a "We're not fixing this in oldstable because backporting in mozilla is a pain" bug.

I try to do the security updates; Beth is unenthusiastic about even those.

Oh, and it turns out that a lot of the problem with Flash was that adblock was, well, blocking it.

Regrettably, we do not have a green elephant installation, even though it would make sense.

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