Patching Firefox Silently
Novell Cool Solutions: Trench
By John Ferrillo
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Posted: 10 Sep 2004 |
We recently rolled out Mozilla Firefox 0.8, extolling the virtue that it is a more secure browser. For the most part our users were very happy. Then the shellblock vulnerability news hit. We are using a very customized build of Firefox and did not want to subject the users to yet another build just yet. Aahhh, behold the power of the ZEN. We needed a transparent way to roll out the patch without our 500+ users having to click anything.
This has probably been done before but I could not find it documented anywhere.
- We built a test machine with a clean, default build of Firefox and then took a snapshot of the machine.
- Then we installed the patch via the Firefox extension update interface.
- After the patch was installed, we then took another snapshot.
- We created the app in ConsoleOne based on the .axt file and then deleted the .fil file relating to perfdata.
- We then pushed out this app, silently without a rebuild, through ZENworks and our users never were the wiser.
To verify that the patch took place, open Firefox, in the browser line type "about:config", in the filter line, type "shell" and verify that the network.protocol.handler is set to false.
If you have any questions you may contact John at johnfe@co.cumberland.nj.us
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