There have been a couple of security patch updates released today for
FreeBSD, our UNIX of choice for almost all of the servers here at
ipHouse.

All FreeBSD servers on the ipHouse network will be rebooted to apply
the following 3 patches to the systems.

	One of these patches is for compression program 'bzip'.  Most
	of our servers do not have any local users on them except for
	staff members of ipHouse so this issue is something that needs
	to be updated, but does *not* require a reboot.

	One of these patches is a kernel patch dealing with the TCP
	stack.  This patch is the one that is causing me to update
	servers and get them rebooted with the new code in place.

	One of these patches is for ipfw, a firewall system for
	FreeBSD (and many other systems).  We do not use ipfw.  This
	patch also requires a reboot.

Most of our servers are clustered, so users should not notice any
issues or out of service interruptions.

Each server will take approximately 2 minutes to reboot and servers
will be rebooted in an efficient manner so as to reduce the chance of
any customers noticing problems.

Clustered servers like the web servers and mail servers will be
rebooted in sequence to keep the most servers online and can be done
at any time.

Servers that will affect users (and will be seen during the reboot of
each server) will be done overnight during off-peak times are:

	caching DNS servers

	authentication servers (redundant systems, though not easily
	clustered)

	NOC and latency servers

Support can be reached Monday thru Friday from 8:00am until 8:00pm,
Saturdays from 11:00am until 4:00pm via phone at 612-337-6340, or via
email at [log in to unmask]

-- 
Mike Horwath                                    [log in to unmask]
                         ipHouse - Welcome home!