In case you've been wondering about the slightly dubious announcements of the past few days: on Friday (2009/08/14) a local privilege escalation in all Linux kernels of the last 7 years was published, together with an exploit. Unfortunately no patched kernels were available by Friday late afternoon, which put us into an awkward position. Generally it is not our policy to be sneaky about security issues, but in this case we really did not want to attract malicious script kiddies. That's why we decided to keep our announcements somewhat vague. By now the worst seems to be over and all machines have been rebooted with patched kernels.

We apologize for any confusion or service degradation this episode may have caused on your side.

We installed new linux kernels for our systems and the machines need to be rebooted to run the new kernel. We will reboot the D-PHYS Linux Workstations this evening after 08:00 pm. Please log out this evening before you go home, save all unsaved work and don't start any long running jobs. You may also reboot your workstation yourself earlier.