TL;DR
The extended Squeeze security support is opt-in. One has to enable the squeeze-lts
distribution in the APT sources; it is not provided through security.debian.org
. Don't forget to do that if you're still running Squeeze, or you will not receive important security updates!
$ echo "deb http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian squeeze-lts main non-free contrib" \
>> sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list \
&& sudo apt-get update \
&& sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
About Debian LTS
Standard security support for Debian GNU/Linux release 6.0 (codename Squeeze) has been terminated May 31st, 2014. While users should have been putting effort in upgrading to Wheezy, a separate team of volunteers announced prolonged security support on April 24, 2014 for at least until February 2016. Cool to see a Debian release to be supported for such a longer time, but I'm just not too excited about it, because I really think this should be announced from the initial release on. Now this is just discouraging users to upgrade to Wheezy and the user base of Squeeze-LTS is just only going to become smaller and smaller.
Not enabled by default
What's not mentioned in the announcement of Squeeze-LTS, is that one needs to enable the squeeze-lts
release channel in order to receive the updates.
I believe a lot of users will not notice it and their systems will likely not be receiving critical security updates released this month like the gnutls26 update and the openssl update.
With a fully updates Squeeze machine, I can confirm the updates are not pushed through security.debian.org
.
$ apt-cache policy libgnutls26
libgnutls26:
Installed: 2.8.6-1+squeeze3
Candidate: 2.8.6-1+squeeze3
Version table:
*** 2.8.6-1+squeeze3 0
500 http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
2.8.6-1+squeeze2 0
500 http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ squeeze/main amd64 Packages
GnuTLS version 2.8.6-1+squeeze3
is from March 2014 (changelog) and clearly does not include fixes for those like the 'Client Hello' vulnerability (CVE-2014-3466) fixed in the announced 2.8.6-1+squeeze4 version by the Squeeze-LTS team.
How to enable Squeeze LTS?
Simply put, add the squeeze-lts
distribution from your regular Debian mirror to your APT's sources.list
configuration. E.g.:
deb http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian squeeze main non-free contrib
deb http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian squeeze-updates main non-free contrib
deb http://security.debian.org squeeze/updates main non-free contrib
# Squeeze LTS
deb http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian squeeze-lts main non-free contrib
Then run
# apt-get update
to update the lists.
Now you can enjoy new security updates pending:
$ apt-cache policy libgnutls26
libgnutls26:
Installed: 2.8.6-1+squeeze3
Candidate: 2.8.6-1+squeeze4
Version table:
2.8.6-1+squeeze4 0
500 http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-lts/main amd64 Packages
*** 2.8.6-1+squeeze3 0
500 http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
2.8.6-1+squeeze2 0
500 http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ squeeze/main amd64 Packages
Don't forget to actually upgrade and to restart all related services!
# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
libgnutls26
[...]
# /etc/init.d/exim4 restart