A couple weeks ago, a serious security hole was found in the sendmail daemon, one of the most popular mail transport agents on the web. The Duke Basketball Report uses this daemon to relay e-mail, including things like BBS confirmation codes. The good people at Sendmail have been working diligently to fix this hole before a malevolent person finds it and exploits it. Today, the patches were ready.
We immediately set out to upgrade the DBR machine. First, we shut down sendmail then we fetched the new binaries. Last, we installed them. Because of the demand for the fixes, the process was slow. Then, we had to update our mail configurations.
Total time to update was under four hours, and things should be back to normal.