before i put a machine on the local network (office) , i'm wondering if there are any significant probelms with ns 3.3 that were never fixed. anything to worry about? mainly, i don't want to attract any attention with it.
btw, i have not installed patch 3 yet, either.
NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP is pretty much outdated when it comes to the installed Unix base, so you better install the availiable updates. A good start to secure any *nix installation is to turn off services like finger, telnet, ftp etc.
If you're putting it on an office lan, you don't have much to worry about.
If you were connecting it directly to the Internet, without a firewall, and you did not run a portscan against it after turning off unrequired services, you *might* have something to worry about. In this day and age, you'd have to go out of your way to plop a machine down directly in the Internet "main stream".
The worst that could happen is someone could get root on the machine (not bloody likely unless you leave telnet open) or DoS it.
Disable unnecessary services:
* Turn off & disable NFS
* Turn off & disable telnet
* Turn off and disable NXHost
* Disallow anonymous ftp connections, or disable the service altogether.
Run nmap (
http://insecure.org/nmap/man/man-port-scanning-basics.html) against it, rinse, repeat.