RHN Errata Alert: Moderate: kernel security and bug fix update

[Red Hat Network Alert <dev-null@rhn.redhat.com>]

Red Hat Network has determined that the following advisory is applicable to
one or more of the systems you have registered:

Complete information about this errata can be found at the following location:
     https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/errata/details/Details.do?eid=9276

Security Advisory - RHSA-2009:1522-1
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Summary:
Moderate: kernel security and bug fix update

Updated kernel packages that fix multiple security issues and several bugs
are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

This update has been rated as having moderate security impact by the Red
Hat Security Response Team.

Description:
The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linux
operating system.

This update fixes the following security issues:

* multiple, missing initialization flaws were found in the Linux kernel.
Padding data in several core network structures was not initialized
properly before being sent to user-space. These flaws could lead to
information leaks. (CVE-2005-4881, CVE-2009-3228, Moderate)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* a packet duplication issue was fixed via the RHSA-2008:0665 update;
however, the fix introduced a problem for systems using network bonding:
Backup slaves were unable to receive ARP packets. When using network
bonding in the "active-backup" mode and with the "arp_validate=3" option,
the bonding driver considered such backup slaves as being down (since they
were not receiving ARP packets), preventing successful failover to these
devices. (BZ#519384)

* due to insufficient memory barriers in the network code, a process
sleeping in select() may have missed notifications about new data. In rare
cases, this bug may have caused a process to sleep forever. (BZ#519386)

* the driver version number in the ata_piix driver was not changed between
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8, even though
changes had been made between these releases. This could have prevented the
driver from loading on systems that check driver versions, as this driver
appeared older than it was. (BZ#519389)

* a bug in nlm_lookup_host() could have led to un-reclaimed locks on file
systems, resulting in the umount command failing. This bug could have also
prevented NFS services from being relocated correctly in clustered
environments. (BZ#519656)

* the data buffer ethtool_get_strings() allocated, for the igb driver, was
smaller than the amount of data that was copied in igb_get_strings(),
because of a miscalculation in IGB_QUEUE_STATS_LEN, resulting in memory
corruption. This bug could have led to a kernel panic. (BZ#522738)

* in some situations, write operations to a TTY device were blocked even
when the O_NONBLOCK flag was used. A reported case of this issue occurred
when a single TTY device was opened by two users (one using blocking mode,
and the other using non-blocking mode). (BZ#523930)

* a deadlock was found in the cciss driver. In rare cases, this caused an
NMI lockup during boot. Messages such as "cciss: controller cciss[x]
failed, stopping." and "cciss[x]: controller not responding." may have
been displayed on the console. (BZ#525725)

* on 64-bit PowerPC systems, a rollover bug in the ibmveth driver could
have caused a kernel panic. In a reported case, this panic occurred on a
system with a large uptime and under heavy network load. (BZ#527225)

Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported
patches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for this
update to take effect.

References:
http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate
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Taking Action
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You may address the issues outlined in this advisory in two ways:

     - select your server name by clicking on its name from the list
       available at the following location, and then schedule an
       errata update for it:
           https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/systems/SystemList.do

     - run the Update Agent on each affected server.


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Affected Systems List
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This Errata Advisory may apply to the systems listed below. If you know that
this errata does not apply to a system listed, it might be possible that the
package profile for that server is out of date. In that case you should refresh 
the system's package profile by running *one* of the following commands as root 
on that system:

 * 'up2date -p' (on Enterprise Linux systems prior to RHEL5)
 * 'rhn-profile-sync' (on Enterprise Linux 5 or later) 

There are 4 affected systems registered in 'Your RHN' (only systems for
which you have explicitly enabled Errata Alerts are shown).

Release   Arch       Profile Name
--------  --------   ------------


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